Conway's Law: too vague #441
Description
The summary of Conway's Law is too vague. This is not a local issue; for example, WP's article misleadingly says that Conway's Law is:
[O]rganizations which design systems (in the broad sense used here) are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations.
This is the summary from the conclusion, not the actual mathematical statement. Conway's Law is actually the much more rigorous statement earlier in the paper:
Speaking as a mathematician might, we would say that there is a homomorphism from the linear graph of a system to the linear graph of its design organization.
A "linear graph" is merely an edges-and-vertices graph of the type that we work with regularly, and a graph homomorphism is merely a function from the vertices of one graph to another s.t. adjacency is preserved. In particular we have a proof of a more formal form of the second sentence's claim:
Lemma. If two distinct connected components x and y of a design organization don't communicate (including indirectly), then no system designed by x communicates with any system designed by y (including indirections), and vice versa. (Conway, 1968, p2)
I will contribute a PR eventually, but I believe that I've provided enough information for somebody else to do it first.