AEM Team Size Non-Scientific Study

[Tom_Fought]

I'm just curious how large your AEM develop team is and how the team is structured around responsibilities. Thanks.

[Tethich]

Hi @Tom_Fought 

It depends on the project.

I have worked on projects where we were 50 people on an AEM project. I have also worked on projects where were 10 or even less, 4.

Here I am talking about teams formed of pure AEM developers (considered backend), UI developers (considered frontend), test team (qa & automation), UX designers, scrum master(s)/iteration manager(s), Product Owners (PO), Business Analyst (BA), project manager, solution and/or enterprise architects.

There is not a predefined recipe like one-fits-all setup. Everything depends on the scope and budget. Depends on the type of the project as well, cause' you might have a PoC, or an MVP or a scale to Production solution. Also in different stages you may have different team sizes and roles. For example in a Discovery phase you might have only business people, end users, architect , BA and some senior technical people. Later you might reduce the number of architects and increase number of developers cause you want to deliver more and more. And later you might enter a maintenance phase where you downsize number of developers and increase L1 support people.

[Tom_Fought]

That makes sense.

I guess I am looking for the size of the core team that always supports and maintains the AEM environment.

[Tethich]

As I said, depends on a lot of things. But to put that in numbers, for example I have seen the following two project setups (strict in terms of AEM developers team):

Project 1: 4 AEM developers

• AEM on-prem
• > 10 git repositories
• ~ 100 AEM components
• 2 templates
• 10 integrations with external systems
• 1 relational database
• 4 private cloud environments
• 1 author virtual machine per env
• 2 to 10 publish virtual machines per env
• 1 dispatcher per env
• dozens of GiBs of content
• 1 site (domain)
• 1 language (English)
• no public access to pages
• developed in 4 years
  
  

Project 2: 4 AEM developers

• AEM as a Cloud Service
• 2 git repositories
• ~ 50 components
• ~ 30 editable templates
• ~ 5 integrations with external third-parties
• mainly standard AEMaaCS envs (Dev, Test, Stage, Prod)
• CDN
• few GiBs of content
• > 100 sites
• average 10 languages per site
• public access to sites
• Developed in 2 - 3 years

[daniel-strmecki]

Hi @Tom_Fought,

I am working on a quite complex AEMaaCS project with >100 websites and our team setup is:

• 1 PO
• 1 SM
• 1 SA
• 1 UI/UX
• 3 BE Devs
• 3 FE Devs
• 4 AMS to cover all time zones

I believe the best solutions are built by small teams composed of talents who really know what they are doing. In my experience staffing too many developers usually doesn't lead to improved velocity or quality.

Hope this helps,

Daniel