Let's assume they had 10 times the people and something between 5 to 20 times the code size. Going from 100 to 1000 people adds a lot complexity. I would think

Let's assume they had 10 times the people and something between 5 to 20 times the code size. Going from 100 to 1000 people adds a lot complexity. I would think that adding good and experienced managers is important. Keeping all these people aligned, avoiding code duplication, reducing dependencies also needs to be addressed on the organization level. One can make it work, but some of the consequences one can't avoid. Though, it has some positive sides, too. But then you'll need a lot of tools and architecture to deal with that. To reduce the code size to write, they probably would need to add frameworks, code generators, model-driven architecture, domain specific language, ... lot's of tools. Let's say you'll need to persist C++ objects into a database, they probably used an OO-database (at that time) for C++ with a special query language. Otherwise they would have used a more traditional relational database, either map things to an object-oriented persistence framework or write SQL. Tool building/usage is key, I would think. Greenspun's tenth rule also applies.