Software projects are usually developed by a team of engineers, software developers, or architects. For simplicity, we will call them developers. Software developers, architects, testers, and all kind of engineers should arguably program from time to time.

However, in most situations we have several people working simultaneously on a software project. This already requires us to take a few things into account, mainly communication and organizational overhead. When we look at the structure within organizations with several teams working on multiple projects, or temporarily even the same project, we deal with even more challenges.

The Conway's law claims that:

That being said, the way in which the teams are organized and communicate with each other will inevitably leak into software design. The organization chart of developers and their effective communication structures has to be considered when constructing software projects. We will have a detailed look into how to construct several distributed systems and more specific microservices in Chapter 8, Microservices and System Architecture.

Even in a single project owned by a team of few developers, there will likely be multiple features and bug fixes being developed simultaneously. This fact impacts how we plan the iterations, organize, and integrate source code, and build and deploy runnable software. In particular Chapter 6, Application Development Workflows and Chapter 7, Testing will cover this topic.