Hi, my name's Chris Ford and I'm a software developer with ThoughtWorks.

And today I'm going to present to you a peti-cucha on the subject of software folklore.

If you haven't heard of a peti-cucha before, it's very simple.

20 slides of 20 seconds each. Now if you are going to find my

petruchure interesting, you probably need to agree with me that culture is important. And not in a

purely general abstract sense of society as a whole, but very specifically for how we carry out our practice of software development.

I think it determines a lot of what we do and how we see ourselves.

Now, one of the great things we do to transmit our culture and software development is to come up with laws.

So Parkinson's law is a classic that says that you'll always be working right up to the deadline. So this law is both

a description of what's going on and also part of our culture as software developers. Brooks's law

is another law about scheduling and captures a truth that people who aren't programmers can't

always easily understand that if people are added to a project, especially a late project,

it does not necessarily add to a speed up. In fact, it often results in a slowdown of progress

while the new people are assimilated to the team. Hofstadter's law is wonderful because not only

does it describe the fundamental inability of software developers to estimate how long it'll take for them to do something, but it's also recursive.

So it's an expression of the way we like to think about the world. We write recursive functions, we write recursive laws.

Murphy's Law is known very widely and says that if anything can go wrong it will.

And for us as software developers whose systems might easily process tens of thousands of transactions

in a very short space of time, we do know that actually if anything can go wrong,

even a 1 million chance at will.

Conway's law is something that is both prescriptive and descriptive.

It says that if we have an organization, then the structure of the software systems built by that organization will be determined by the structure of the organization.

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