How do committes invent?

This paper introduces the concept that later became known as “Conway’s Law”. He has a mathematical background and this shows in this paper. He posits that it different teams are used to create an end product, and these teams do not communicate - then the end product will be the teams outputs glued together. Therefore it follows that the output mimics the communication style of the company. Teams that communicate produce coherent singular outputs, teams that do no make products that are compartmentalised by the teams that created them.

He gives an example of writing two computer code compilers - one for Algol and one for Colbol. The first compiler had 3 people working on it and the second 5 people. In the resulting programs the Algol compiler had 3 stages and the Colbol had 5 stages.