Sixty percent of respondents to a recent survey sponsored by SoftServe, a
provider of software consulting, development, testing and more, reported
increases in 2009 IT development budgets, despite the uncertain global economic
climate.
The survey, of more than 6,000 senior-level business leaders and software
development professionals, also found that 26 percent of respondents said that
their software development budgets had increased by more than 10 percent over
2008 expenditures.
“During this economic recession, the competitive application outsourcing
arena has become even more fierce as customers push for lower cost and improved
operational efficiencies. Flexible, consistent delivery and management models,
alongside scalability, reliability and high performance, will be critical as
new hosting models become viable alternatives to the enterprise,” wrote Rona
Shuchat, director of Application Outsourcing Services at IDC,
in a statement.
Other key findings of the survey include that nearly three-quarters, or 71
percent, of respondents listed new product or software development as a top
priority for their organization, with cost- and expense-cutting following with
51 percent; improving usability for the end user ranked third with 49 percent.
In addition, 62 percent of respondents said their software development
efforts were focused specifically on enterprise applications, while 51 percent
said they were focused on Web-based applications. Meanwhile, 42 percent said
they favor agile software development methodologies, with only 18 percent
claiming to support the waterfall method. And just over one-third, or 36
percent, said they employed Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI) as
their process maturity and quality model, with Six Sigma used by 25 percent,
according to the survey.
Discussing overall satisfaction with their development processes, 87 percent
of respondents reported comfort with their company’s basic coding skills, but
overall design, process and execution approaches to development were reported
to come up lacking, the survey showed. In fact, 36 percent of respondents
indicated a need for improved project management and identified project scope
and estimation as an area for concern. And 34 percent said they needed help in
defining business requirements for development projects.
Also, regarding the use of outsourcing, 38 percent of organizations reported
the use of some type of software development outsourcing. While outsourcers
varied widely by location, two-thirds, or 67 percent, of companies using
offshore outsourcing did so in India, while Ukraine ranked among top
outsourcing destinations, along with China and other Eastern European countries,
as the top development locations to watch.
“Even amidst reports of global economic uncertainty and confusion, many
companies are choosing to steel themselves for recovery by investing more, not
less, in business-critical software development initiatives,” said Taras
Kytsmey, president of SoftServe, in a statement. “Though overall findings of
this survey point to project management and design of such initiatives as
ongoing challenges, the most important thing is that these organizations
recognize the need for improvement in the people, processes, tools and
communication employed in these efforts. This data gives companies a starting
point for streamlining development efforts onward into 2010 and ensuring that
development initiatives translate into greater return on software investments.”
In another key finding from the survey, companies reported the execution of
software customization and integration in varying systems and environments,
with Microsoft Dynamics/SharePoint the most used at 42 percent of
organizations, and Oracle and SAP
integration taking place at 38 percent and 29 percent, respectively.
Application Development News & Reviews 
