Why Can’t Programmers Be More Like Ants? Or a Lesson in Stigmergy
In the good old days before the Internet vanquished time and distance, software developer teams were autocratic organizations as shown in Figure 1a. Face-to-face teams developed in a top-down linear fashion under the auspices of a chief programmer. This required central planning and control, and strict adherence to sequential “waterfall” methods. The time and effort to develop a program of m lines of code grew exponentially, mt, largely because of this organizational structure. The resulting program structure mirrored the top-down structure of the organization according to “Conway’s Law”—that the structure of the system mirrors the structure of the organization that designed it [1 , 2]. For the most part, software systems mimicked the structure in Figure 1a.
But then something unusual happened. Software structures underwent a radical change as their development teams became distributed across time and space, as shown in Figure 1b. Instead of a centrally planned, top-down, linear structure, code structure became network-like. Shortage of programmers, lower labor costs in emerging countries, and lifestyle preferences of the extreme programmer all contributed to this tectonic shift. As a consequence of socio-economic pressures and the Internet, a different kind of development process emerged. And in keeping with Conway’s Law, the structure of code followed suit.
