OrdinarySoftware

OrdinarySoftware (as opposed to BigBrainSoftware) is the kind of software that you find everywhere in the industry, including inside startups. The goal of this kind of software is mainly flexibility, and only after that does it care about performance. The ability to iterate reasonably quickly is an attractive feature in OrdinarySoftware.

This type of software often has modest scaling needs, though not always. It often serves a small to medium quantity of users, although large and very large user numbers can also be served quite easily in many (most?) cases. There is an emphasis on flexibility as opposed to scalability; see ScalableSoftware.

Team sizes range from very small (1 part-time developer) to very large (100's of developers). This allows the teams to iterate rapidly and without stepping on each other's toes. It is also not a blocker to scalability, because adding more developers does not make a piece of software scale; adding more machines, does. This is why small software teams can often build very impactful pieces of OrdinarySoftware.