What Is a Small Project?

When you first consider a "small project," you might think about the number of people involved; typically, a project with fewer than ten people is said to be "small." You can also measure by the duration of the project, the amount of code produced, the amount of money spent on the project, or the complexity involved.

But we think that the key characteristics of a small project are:

• The level of formality , which usually correlates with the number of people on the project

• The complexity of the new code, which seems to correlate to the number of people involved

• The length of time you have to work on the project

For example, if you're working on a five-person team, and all team members sit in the same office, your communications need to be much less formal than if you're on a geographically distributed team of 250 people. If you're working on a simple reporting system, you need fewer formal artifacts than you do if you're working on a missile guidance system, and certainly fewer people and fewer lines of code.

There are, of course, exceptions to this general rule. Some projects with few people require high degrees of formality ”think of the level of formality you'd need to develop life-support software that complies with government and industry regulations. And some large projects are run very informally.