Michael Feathers:

It’s funny. I can’t count the number of times I’ve seen organizations with large monolithic software applications move toward SOA. It’s easy to think that we’ve learned a lesson in the industry and that services are just the new “best practice.” Surely we would’ve started with them if we were just starting development now. Actually, I think the truth is a bit more jarring. Different architectures work at different scales. Maybe we need to recognize that and understand when to leap from one to another.

The process space has similar issues. If we cargo-cult anything from the small team space into the large organization space, we’re falling prey to a blind spot. We’re missing an opportunity to re-think things and figure out what works best for small teams, interacting teams, and large-scale development. They may be quite different things.

I agree that the rules are different for different organisation sizes. I like Michael’s comparison of moving across organisation sizes to state transitions in physics.