The rule that the organization of the software and the organization of the software team will be congruent; commonly stated as "If you have four groups working on a compiler, you'll get a 4-pass compiler". (...snip...) There is also Tom Cheatham's amendment of Conway's Law: "If a group of N persons implements a COBOL compiler, there will be N-1 passes. Someone in the group has to be the manager."