[tmorton]

I see Conway's Law as a statement about the world, not a class of problems. Team size is capped by human nature, and systems will develop to mirror team sizes. The only solution is to find lower-communication "seams" for both your team boundaries and your system boundaries.

Abstraction layers around teams sounds like a good thing, as long as they abstraction layers make sense.

[geofft]

Abstraction layers around systems are a good thing. Teams have all sorts of weird properties, like a manager's willingness to focus on problems or recruit certain types of people. In an ideal world, teams and systems line up; in practice they don't, and Conway's Law is that the system design starts to conform to the team structure instead of vice versa.