Survey Time Again, or Will a Hat Keep Your Head Warm?

There's a lot of rhetoric flying about -- but not much hard data -- about what IT departments and IT professional actually do in practice to make fact-based decisions as to how to organize the work they do.

To address the issue and answer some questions, I'd like to invite you to participate in the November 2009 of Dr. Dobb's State of the IT Union Survey, compiled and coordinated by Senior Contributing Editor Scott Ambler. The goal of this ongoing survey series is to find out what IT professionals are actually doing in practice. The survey should take you less than 5 minutes to complete, and your privacy will be completely protected.

At the end of the survey, you will be given the chance to be entered into a draw for one of 10 copies of Leading Lean Software Development, by Mary and Tom Poppendieck (Addison Wesley, November 2009). Additionally, Dr. Dobb's again is giving you the opportunity to be entered in a draw for one of five official Dr. Dobb's hats.

The results of this survey will be summarized in a forthcoming article by Scott. This is an open survey, so the source data (without identifying information to protect your privacy), a summary slide deck, and the original source questions will be posted at www.ambysoft.com/surveys/ so that others may analyze the data for their own purposes. Data from previous surveys have been used by university students and professors for their research papers, and hopefully the same will be true of the data from this survey. The results from several other surveys are already posted there, so please feel free to take advantage of this resource.

This is on the heels of the September 2009 State of the IT Union Survey, which had similar goals. Scott presents the feedback and results of that survey here. It's interesting stuff.

But the big news is that five randomly selected participants should have received their official Dr. Dobb's hats by now. Congratulations to Lawrence Becker, David Radford, Rich Joyner, Thomas Mossberg, and Phil Sargeant. Thanks for participating guys, and I hope the hats keep your heads warm and eyes shaded.

Don't miss your chance to get a Dr. Dobb's hat while they last. It just takes 5 minutes of your time to complete the survey and throw your hat in the Dr. Dobb's ring.

Go right now to Dr. Dobb's State of the IT Union Survey.

-- Jonathan Erickson
jerickson@ddj.com

Posted by Jon Erickson at 11:58 AM  Permalink