>There are projects which exceed 10000 hr and require a little bit bigger team :-) and deadline is less than 6 months. That was the reason Venelina to rise her team to 17 programmers.
>May be that was the reason big companies to trust more to NASDAQ listed teams, than to small shops.
>But there are not guarantees that they will be able to finish the project. We rewrite project for Alberta, Canada based firm which was started from that kind of company but they failure. The code was owful but they have good GUI

I don't think there are any projects that require over three man years, unless it's a tool project like fox (but the fox team is relatively small).

The most important thing is the flow and the plan (and sticking to it:-)!

The most a project should need:
1) A leader - designer and primary VFP developer contractor
2) A DBA / SQL System Adminstrator contractor (would not require full time)
3) A Webmaster/ASP contractor (would not require full time)

I would expect the client to provide "business" expertise like CPA, MBA and engineers to help with computationand workflow (rythm) issues.

I've worked addon projects to existing team projects. Sometimes teams are sluggish and more concerned about politics than delivery. Low skill sets will (and usually do) break the project.

In some cases, sadly, the skills are not there to deliver even should a generous bonus or damaging penalties be included in the contract.

Of course, each member of the development team would have to be a super developer with a history of solid deliveries. They would need to think in terms of "volumns", and not in terms of "chapters" or "pages".

SET TWO CENTS OFF :-)