Scaling down is hard to do [software management]
Mauri Laitinen · IEEE Software · 2000
Software engineering originally had to cope with large-scale problems. Although programming environments have evolved to support small groups, software management methods have not. The main problem is that management practices designed for large departments are inefficient for smaller ones. It's interesting that, although we recognize the limits of scaling in hardware, we ignore such limits in software management. Although many software engineering methods have proved valuable, the totality of these methods has not been proved optimal for small groups. Scaling down is not simple and it has clear limits. Methods that have too much overhead for their relative benefits are ultimately unsustainable. This is the central problem with scaling down large, formal communication-laden systems. We can scale a method only if we can apply it to differently sized problems without fundamentally changing it - and for many methods, it is unclear whether this is possible. We must study the development needs of smaller groups to create methods that work for them