Conways Law – the concept that your product resembles your org structure – is a double-edged sword. If your organization is intentionally structured to optimize your strengths, it’s great! However, oftentimes organizations are the result of unintentional design; leading to accidental complexity and inability to maximize results. Even when organizations are intentionally designed, they can optimize the wrong things – such as command and control, leading to clunky outcomes. Why does this happen? How can you tell if this is happening in your organization?! Is it preventable? Fixable? The short answer is: YES! In my current role as the Director of Engineering for our billion-dollar ads business, I and my team have been given the unique opportunity to redesign our organization for speed, collaboration and results. We decided to put our principles into practice by using two system design principles to organize our 100-person team who support our hundreds of components : DDD (Domain Driven Design): “ a software development philosophy centered around the domain, or sphere of knowledge, of those that use it”; and BAPO (Business Architecture Process Organization): Jan Bosch’s expression of strategic organization design. Join me to discuss a real-world case study in applying these principles and how it’s progressing 6 months in!
If you're familiar with unit testing, you're probably also familiar with the brittleness and excessive boilerplate that often results from overuse of mock objects and other test doubles. They're a great tool, sure, but they also make tests hard to re…
