Socio-Technical Modeling as a Practice
summary
Argues that code, people and tools must be modeled together using Conway's Law and Actor-Network ideas, showing concrete patterns: a shared testing framework used by 5 teams becomes a giant base class with no owner, causing two teams to vendor the code and three to build a plugin architecture instead. Shows power‑law distributions in method sizes and contributors, recommends very small teams (even two‑person) and explicit ownership or archivist roles to preserve context.
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chapters (10)
- 0:00Introduction to socio-technical modeling
- 3:54Graph theory and team structure
- 8:27Conway's law and team-code isomorphism
- 13:48Power law distributions in teams
- 21:30Natural forces in scaling systems
- 28:10Small teams and cognitive limits
- 34:13Code-team connection and legacy systems
- 37:45Avoiding organizational props
- 40:34Cognitive load and scaling limits
- 42:19Q&A on trade-offs and management
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