Building Microservices: Designing Fine-Grained Systems

by Sam Newman

Loose and Tightly Coupled Organizations In Exploring the Duality Between Product and Organizational Architectures (Harvard Business School), the authors Alan MacCormack, John Rusnak, and Carliss Baldwin look at a number of different software systems, loosely categorized as being created either by loosely coupled organizations or tightly coupled organizations. For tightly coupled organizations, think commercial product firms that are typically colocated with strongly aligned visions and goals, while loosely coupled organizations are well represented by distributed open source communities. In their study, in which they matched similar product pairs from each type of organization, the authors found that the more loosely coupled organizations actually created more modular, less coupled systems, whereas the more tightly focused organization’s software was less modularized.