The 2011 IT Project Success survey is now up and running at http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/8D8YRB9. The goal of this survey is to find out how successful various software development approaches (ad hoc, agile, iterative, lean, and serial/traditional) are in practice. There's a lot of rhetoric flying around, but not a lot of hard data. IT departments struggle to make fact-based decisions as to how to organize their work. You can help to rectify this problem by filling out this survey as honestly and thoroughly as you can.

This survey should take no more than 10 minutes to complete. It's lengthy, but it's important. To thank you for investing your valuable time, we'll enter each respondent into a drawing, 10 of whom will win their choice of one of the following books:

1. The Economics of Software Quality by Capers Jones and Olivier Bonsignour
2. Agile Analytics by Ken Collier
3. The Clean Coder by Robert C. Martin

The drawing is optional; you don't have to share your email with us (and we won't use your email for anything other than this giveaway).

The results of this survey will be summarized in a forthcoming column in Dr. Dobb's. Furthermore, 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 in research papers by university students and professors, and hopefully the same will be true of the data from this survey. The results from several other surveys are already posted on my website. Please feel free to take advantage of this resource.

URL for the survey: http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/8D8YRB9

Thanks for helping to make this survey a success!

—Scott