Conway's Law prov.
The rule that the organization of the software and the
organization of the software team will be congruent; commonly
stated as "If you have four groups working on a compiler, you'll
get a 4-pass compiler". The original statement was more general,
"Organizations which design systems are constrained to produce
designs which are copies of the communication structures of these
organizations." This first appeared in the April 1968 issue of
Datamation. Compare SNAFU principle.
The law was named after Melvin Conway, an early proto-hacker
who wrote an assembler for the Burroughs 220 called SAVE. (The
name `SAVE' didn't stand for anything; it was just that you lost
fewer card decks and listings because they all had SAVE written
on them.)
There is also Tom Cheatham's amendment of Conway's Law: "If a
group of N persons implements a COBOL compiler, there will be N-1
passes. Someone in the group has to be the manager."