Seminar

Conway’s Law and the Modern Observatory

August 24, 2017

Frossie Economou

Conway’s law famously states that “any organization that designs a system (defined broadly) will produce a design whose structure is a copy of the organization's communication structure”. Perhaps for anyone involved in practical astronomy, especially in large projects, this seems an alarming prospect. In this talk I am going to draw on some of the work of LSST’s Science Quality and Reliability Engineering (SQuaRE) group to make the case that software practices and tooling can help break down some of the communication and technical barriers that can sometimes arise in large (and not-so-large) astronomical projects.

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