April Software News Roundup
In this roundup of interesting software news for April, read about how developers are more satisfied with their jobs than ever before, and a fascinating new survey to be conducted on agile software development practices in the New York metropolitan community.
Entering the Golden Age of Software Development
Just as there was a golden age of comic books, it seems we are entering the golden age of software development. According to a recent survey by IT automation company Chef, “developers are starting to be recognized as a highly influential population both in business and in society.”
The company polled a thousand US developers on trends in development and their behavior and found that 93 percent of the respondents said they “feel empowered to experiment in their companies.”
ZDNet explored the survey’s results in more detail and concluded that not only are developers holding their jobs longer than ever (nine years is the new norm), but developers are also happier with their jobs than their peers who are not in the field.
From ZDNet:
The survey also dispelled two long-running stereotypes about developers: that they are introverted, and that they frequently job hop. The Chef survey finds that developers are informed and engaged participants in social and civic activities. They equally value the political power of technology (51 percent) and government leaders (49 percent). Seventy-one percent of developers participated in political and civic activities in the last 12 months.
Survey to Be Conducted on New York’s Agile Software Development Practices
Nonprofit development advocacy group NY Spin, which stands for New York’s Software and Systems Process Improvement Network, has announced that it will be conducting a survey that will compare “the Agile development practices of the New York metropolitan development community against world-wide results.”
QSM Associates, a software management tool company, will help NY Spin conduct the survey, which includes questions related to the effectiveness of agile projects compared to waterfall and plan-based projects as well as the productivity of local agile teams versus offshore teams. After gathering the data, the study is slated to compare those results “to the 12,000 completed projects both Agile and traditional contained in the global SLIM database.”
It’s hard not to get a little bit excited about what the survey could tell us, as government entities have started to heed the call to agile, albeit in small steps. Given the size and scope of the New York metropolitan area, a lot of interesting data probably will be gleaned.
In the press release Michael C. Mah, managing director of QSM Associates, commented:
Metro New York is the center of North America's business world, and one would expect this region to be leading the way in the use of advanced programming techniques. Yet, nobody has compared the effectiveness and other artifacts of the metro NY development community against SLIM worldwide projects database, the largest repository of its kind. This will be a landmark study, for not only the NY software development community but for Agile followers worldwide.
