Testing Patterns

bullet1 Size of the project :

  • small: all participants fit into a room
  • medium
  • huge
  • distributed


The size of a project is another crucial parameter: do all participants fit into one room or around a table ? Are there hundreds of people involved ? Are the participants distributed between several locations, or between different organizations ? And in case it's a huge project: is it possible to divide it into - more or less - independent sub-projects ? The answers on these question will affect the communication channels (face-to-face, web-based, ...), the coordination and management (centralized, distributed, agile, fat,  ...) and the whole social structure of the endeavor (collaborative, hostile, ...) Anyway there's a prize to be paid for huge projects - the common currencies are friction and coordination problems - and it's the art of project management to keep this prize low and mitigate the negative side-effects. In addition big projects tend to develop clumsy hierarchies, politics and turf wars.