Just The Facts Ma’am

Dragnet was a radio program, and later a television show - one of the first police dramas. One of the main characters was Sergeant Joe Friday, played by Jack Webb, and his imperative "Just the facts, Ma'am," was his trademark. Getting the facts wasn't easy for Joe Friday and getting the facts about a software organization isn’t easy either. Like Joe Friday, that is what I do, I get the facts.

The book is the compellation of twenty years of consulting and research. I have notebooks and spreadsheets full of quantitative and qualitative data that I have gathered from clients. I have not limited myself to using just data I have gathered from consulting assignments. I have compared and contrasted my data with other private data sources by swapping data with other consultants. I have gleaned data from government agencies such as the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) in the USA, Eurostat (Europe), the Office of National Statistics (UK), and a variety of government sources for Asian and South American countries. Another source of data comes from published annual reports and strategic plans. Many publicly traded corporations outline in great detail their investment plans for software development. Often, they provide their views on the direction of software development in their specific industrial sector. Current and past annual reports are online and can be downloaded for free. Another source of data comes from industry trade publications. I scour several trade publications. The health care industry has Health Management Technology, Radiology Today, Digital Healthcare & Productivity, and Government Health IT. The government sector has publications such as Government Technology Public CIO’s, Government Technology, and Government Computing. Some trade publications are very specialized such as Fire Engineering that serves the management and information technology needs for fire and emergency services, or Mortgage Technology that supports the lending industry, or Mailing Systems Technology that is relevant to the mailing industry. I could go on and on because there is an endless stream of technology magazines. I also examine job posting on Monster.com and CareerBuilder.com looking for industry trends.

Using my data, government data, published corporate data, trade publications, and some other sources, I study individual software organizations and the software development industry. From an economics perspective, I study software development from both the micro and macro levels.

Data

My data I use throughout this book comes from the following five different types of consulting engagements: