Enterprise Cloud Software: How small is a small team?

Many startups or small companies have very small teams developing big enterprise products, while there are larger companies having multiple people developing and managing the products. A basic enterprise software has the following functions:

1. Program Management
2. Developers
3. Testers
4. DevOps
5. Project Managers

Some of these activities can be performed by people having more than one responsibility. For example, a Program Manager might have a dual role of performing Project Management. Or a Lead Developer can take up the role of a project manager besides leading the team.

A developer most often also performs DevOps activity and in case of an SRE can be responsible for the upkeep of the deployed environment.

It really is about scale and the target of the product being developed. For a small to medium B2B application, a dedicated SRE or DevOps Engineer may not be required. A public facing high volume product, though developed with a few developers, will require SRE or a dedicated DevOps Engineer to manage uptime.

So how do we determine the scale of the team? It really comes down to one thing – Are we assuming that persons in the team won’t take leave or will not have emergencies?

As a project, we should have enough redundancies that the deliverables aren’t affected by sudden absence of allotted person to the role.

Let’s assume, a minimal scenario – we have a Lead Developer and a couple of developers on a B2B solution for a small to medium organization. Assuming the delivery date is 2 months away, It is easy to assume that all the three developers will have a day or two during this time in sickness or absent otherwise. In which case does it impact the delivery date or the quality? If the answer is no, then there are enough redundancies and the team size is good. If the answer is yes, it is obvious that the delivery of the product/project is destined for delay or failure. An Enterprise solution cannot be built on the dependence of a few or on the assumption that people won’t take leaves. Either there will be delays or there will be a tragic drop in quality of the product.