Scott Ambler has launched this year's installment of his annual State of the IT Union Survey. The goal of this ongoing survey series is to find out what IT professionals are actually doing in practice. As Scott says, there's a lot of rhetoric flying around out there but not a lot of hard data, making it difficult for IT departments to make fact-based decisions as to how to organize the work that they do. You can help rectify this problem by filling out this survey as honestly and thoroughly as you can.

The results of this survey will be summarized by Scott in an upcoming Dr. Dobb's Agile Update. 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 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.

There are 15 questions on four pages in this survey, it 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 five copies of  the recently published The Economics of Iterative Software Development by Walker Royce, Kurt Bittner, and Mike Perrow, courtesy of Addison-Wesley.

Please take a few minutes to share your thoughts and experiences by completing the  State of the IT Union Survey.