Exploring the Duality between Product and Organizational Architectures

MacCormack, A., Baldwin, C., & Rusnak, J. (2012). Exploring the Duality between Product and Organizational Architectures: A Test of the 'Mirroring' Hypothesis. Research Policy, 41(8), 1309-1324.

Type

Journal article

Intellectual base

Primary research

Year

2012

Volume

41

Issue

8

Pages

1309-1324

DOI

10.1016/j.respol.2012.04.011

DOI registrant

Elsevier

Link

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.respol.2012.04.011

Cited from

art_aesthetics, computer_science, engineering_design, library_information_science, mathematics, organizational_management, philosophy

Cited by

10 citations across 10 artifacts.

Each citation links to the sentence it supports in the citing article.

Primes

• Abstraction

  • This sourceTests whether product architecture mirrors the architecture of the developing organization.

• Boundary
  • Listed in the references but not attached to a specific claim.
• Compatibility
  • Listed in the references but not attached to a specific claim.
• Conway's Law
  • Software architecture — the original substrate: service boundaries track team boundaries, APIs are costlier where the owning teams talk less, and monolith-to-microservices migrations succeed when the team graph is re-cut first and fail when it is not.

    This sourceEmpirical evidence that product architecture mirrors the developing organization's communication structure, with producer-side causality dominant in matched product comparisons. (

    Supported in partVerified against the work's full text

    This work supports the mirroring frame -- that an organization's communication structure constrains the architecture it produces -- but not the claim's API-cost or migration-sequencing clauses.

    “This dynamic occurs because the organization's governance structures, problem solving routines, and communication patterns constrain the space in which it searches for new solutions.”

    Read by an automated reader; not a human review. How support was checked

• Decomposition
  • Listed in the references but not attached to a specific claim.
• Dependency

  • This sourceEmpirically tests whether product dependency structure mirrors the organization's communication structure.

• Layering
  • Listed in the references but not attached to a specific claim.
• Minimalism
  • Listed in the references but not attached to a specific claim.
• Modularity
  • A common failure is a modular architecture that is theoretically elegant but practically impenetrable to developers who must maintain and integrate it
• Task Interdependence
  • Listed in the references but not attached to a specific claim.

Verification

Does it exist? Confirmed. This work's DOI resolves to a registered record, which fixes its identity. That is all it fixes.

Does it back the claim? Read against the text for 1 of 10 citations: 1 supported in part. Each verdict is shown under its citation below, with what in the work backs the sentence.

Support is checked per citation rather than per work — the same source can be cited soundly in one article and wrongly in another. Per-citation recording began recently, so a citation with no recorded check is a gap in the record rather than evidence it went unchecked.

See how references were verified.

Registry ID ref:ab914d23f717 · see in the full table