Back Room Front Room 2

ORGANIZATIONAL PATTERNS
Beyond Technology to People
James O. Coplien
PROG Group, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, PO Box 4557, Wheaton, IL 60540, USA
Email: JOCoplien@cs.com
Keywords: Pattern language, software development, architecture, anthropology, ethnography, Christopher Alexander.
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.
1 INTRODUCTION
Architecture is one of the longest-standing and
widely known metaphors in computer science. Most
software engineering communities—whether in
software production, computer science education, or
software management—harbour deeply held
intuitions about its importance. Awe of architecture
(and not, perhaps surprisingly, for either
requirements or for coding) has propelled the
popularity of notations such as UML, the
I. Seruca et al. (eds.), Enterprise Information Systems VI,
© 2006 S pringer. Printed in the Netherlands.
43
43–52.
methodologies that embed them, and the tools that
express them.
Each software development organization has its
own architectural principles. Such principles as
coupling and cohesion and modularity are almost
universal, and other principles such as the Laws of
Demeter are peculiar to such design styles as object
orientation.
Are these true principles, or just shadows of a
deeper and more important principle that has come
to be ignored?