Team Effectivenss “Laws”

Conway’s Law

Refers to a 1968 paper by Mel Conway, that includes this phrase:

“Organizations which design systems … are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures in those organizations.”

Implies that the organization must be chosen to map to the intended architectural design.

Brooks’s Law

Refers to Mel Brook’s 1975 book The Mythical Man-Month.

It states that “adding manpower to a late software project makes it later.”.

Dunbar’s Number

Refers to findings by anthropologist Robin Dunbar:

  • A person can only trust around 15 people

  • Of those, only about 5 can be known and trusted closely

This gives a heuristic that ideal team size is around 5-8 people.

Some Team Peformance Models

Tuckman Model

Describes four stages for a team lifecycle:

  1. Forming: team is created

  2. Storming: team figures out personalities and sorts out how to retail_international_products

  3. Norming: team evolves to a standard way to operate

  4. Performing:* team reaches high effectiveness