I've often thought about putting together a good mix of infrastructure software into one distro/appliance. You could provide: - Router - VPN - VoIP - Email

I've often thought about putting together a good mix of infrastructure software into one distro/appliance. You could provide: - Router - VPN - VoIP - Email - Version control - Issue tracker - Wiki - File server/SMB/FTP - Etc. You could save a startup a lot of headache if this stuff was boxed up for $500-$1000 or so. It would be well worth it if it buys you more time on your product. As for processes, it seems like engineering processes are mainly affected by one decision: how do you break up milestones/versions? You can 1) aim for a constant amount of time per cycle, and cut a prioritized list of issues to fit or 2) decide what you need to do for a milestone, estimate the time required for each issue, and go at it until you finish. I've seen successful projects in both areas, so maybe it's a style thing. The important thing is that you do something. Another important thing is deciding the lifecycle of a bug/improvement/feature. And toss it out the window for things that are easier to do than to file. Also, as the project matures, you need a story for the division of eng time between bug fixing and creating new features. If you do support, you'll need a way to respond to the pressure from that. Maybe alternating responsibilities between engineers would help keep a constant response time to customer issues. For team organization, trying to split things up into silos with less than 4 engineers or so seems pretty counterproductive, unless there is a huge disparity for some particular skill. As you grow, organize teams around major areas: frontend, backend, developer support, etc. If you're going to be hiring, decide on how interviews will be carried out and what the decision criteria will be. Keeping it fairly uniform will allow you to measure it better. The important thing is to stay responsive to feedback from the trenches (even if "the trenches" is just you for now). Just some off-the-cuff ideas that your post brought to mind.