Laws of Software Engineering

Named laws, principles, and heuristics that every software engineer should know.

topics
topic Conway's Law Organizations design systems that mirror their communication structures. read topic Brooks's Law Adding manpower to a late project makes it later due to communication overhead. read topic Amdahl's Law The speedup of a system is limited by the fraction of work that cannot be parallelized. read topic Goodhart's Law When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. read topic Little's Law The average number of items in a queue equals arrival rate times average wait time. read topic Parkinson's Law Work expands to fill the time available for its completion. read topic Postel's Law Be conservative in what you send, be liberal in what you accept. read topic Hyrum's Law With enough users, all observable behaviors of a system become depended on. read