Conway's Law

Melvin Conway: organizations which design systems ... are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations. (1967) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_law

Alistair Cockburn: "On the Interaction of Social Issues and Software Architecture": This paper presents a pattern language and a case study showing social forces affecting software design decisions. The forces are "soft" (skill mix, movement of people, team structuring), but the solutions are "hard" (inheritance hierarchies, access functions, subsystems). Use of a pattern language allows dissenters to argue over the principles and the decisions, and allows the curious to use or vary the results.