Organizational Patterns

Abstract

Most of the software discipline has come to honor the role of architecture to organize software development. The software pattern discipline has taken up the architectural metaphor quite literally, borrowing its key notions from Christopher Alexander, an innovative master builder of houses, neighborhoods, and towns. However, the software industry has missed the obvious: that architecture is a secondary concern that precipitates from the structure of the enterprise that builds it. Getting the architecture right means getting the enterprise structure right: it is certainly a necessary and potentially sufficient condition for achieving most of the goals that software engineering holds out for architectural activity.

Like most metaphors, the architectural metaphor breaks down somewhere. Unlike houses, whose structure tends to reflect the activities of the end users of the product, the structure of software exists more to serve those who build it than those who use it. This parallel has been shifting, but not on the software side: modern buildings, driven more by technology that make it possible to create 100-foot spans on the ground floor of a skyscraper, pay homage to the technology to be used in construction, and to the design techniques used to support that technology. Software, a largely technological field, has had this outlook almost from the beginning. As an industry focused on technology, it is no surprise that our software pattern discipline has taken up a largely technical agenda. Our current direction in patterns avoids the most central foundation of the pattern discipline: to build systems that are beautiful, morally profound, and “habitable” for the people they touch.

Yet there is hope: as a strong parallel to the structural concerns of software that are found in software architecture, organizational patterns give a voice to the crucial structural constructs of software development enterprises. It is these structures of human relationships, rather than the technological underpinnings, that drive architecture. That fact has long been known to the industry as Conway’s Law, but most managers view Conway’s Law more as a Dilbertesque joke than as a sober planning principle.

Organizational patterns are a major stride for creating the generative structure of the business—the structure of the enterprise itself—that gives rise to such other important structures as the system architecture and, by inference, the system’s human interface. The first major pattern language of software organizational structure has been completed after a decade of research. There is much more that can be done—not just by organizational specialists, but also by “software people” of every job and description.