That Conway Paper
In the past month I realized the great significance of this paper, which had been sleeping in my reading list for 5 months. (The title looked distasteful to me: “Committees”, “How to invent”.) I invite everyone to read just the enlightening examples in it. Consider poststructuralism, and why making people conform to software often doesn’t work.
Examples. A contract research organization had eight people who were to produce a COBOL and an ALGOL compiler. After some initial estimates of difficulty and time, five people were assigned to the COBOL job and three to the ALGOL job. The resulting COBOL compiler ran in five phases, the ALGOL compiler ran in three.
Two military services were directed by their Commander-in-Chief to develop a common weapon system to meet their respective needs. After great effort they produced a copy of their organization chart.