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2 - PROJECT LIFE CYCLE AND ORGANIZATION

the problems of communication within and among teams because the number of communication paths within a
closely coordinated team increases exponentially with the number of team members. Several small teams have
fewer overall communication paths than one large team when each team has a single point of contact with other
teams (see Section 5 of this Software Extension). Other functional elements of a software organization may provide 2
supporting services such as configuration management, infrastructure tools and support, and separate verification
and validation capabilities.

Alignment of a software project’s organizational structure with the desired structure of the software product is
another consideration. Melvin Conway, in a statement that became known as Conway’s Law, made the following
observation:

“Any organization that designs a system (defined more broadly here than just information systems) will
inevitably produce a design whose structure is a copy of the organization’s communication structure.” [17]
According to Conway’s Law, a project that is organized using three software development teams (or a single
team of 3 members) will tend to develop a software product having three components; when a project of four teams
(or a single team of 4 team members) develops the same product it will likely have four components, because
software is a product of the closely coordinated effort of teams and team members who allocate among themselves
the features and interfaces to be implemented.

Like all “software laws,” Conway’s Law is a guideline rather than a law of physics or chemistry.

2.1.4 Organizational Process Assets

According to Section 2.1.4 of the PMBOK Guide, organizational process assets include any and all process-
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related assets that can be used to influence the project’s success, from any or all of the organizations involved in
the project. In the PMBOK Guide, organizational project assets are grouped as processes and procedures, and
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the corporate knowledge base. The PMBOK Guide provides examples of project assets; they are applicable to
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software projects. Additional considerations for software projects include the following.

2.1.4.1 Processes and Procedures

The processes and procedures of many software development and service organizations are based on ISO/IEC
and IEEE standards for software engineering, and on the Capability Maturity Models and the process asset library
of the Software Engineering Institute.

Some ISO/IEC and IEEE standards that have been harmonized and issued as joint standards (ISO/IEC/IEEE)
include:
• ISO/IEC/IEEE 12207: Systems and software engineering—Software project life cycle processes, and

• ISO/IEC/IEEE 16326: Systems and software engineering—Life cycle processes—Project management [18].

©2013 Project Management Institute. Software Extension to the PMBOK Guide Fifth Edition 21
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