Software engineering economics
Software engineering economics is the economics of the software industry.
Macro economics
The field of software engineering supports a commercial software sector that earns $200 billion to $240 billion in the United States every year. Software engineering drove $1 trillion of economic growth in the U.S. over the last decade.
Micro economics
About half of all software projects are cancelled by users who change their minds, whether or not the software engineers would have succeeded.
Maintenance: Most (70% or more) software engineering effort over the total lifetime of a system goes into maintenance and upgrades.
Delivery: In the course of taking a large software project from conception to end user acceptance (and actual use) the cost of developing the software will typically range from 20-30% of the total. Other activities (documentation, Training infrastructure, Support infrastructure, Deployment and Network design, etc) account for the other 70-80%.
Commercial developers write 12,000 lines of code per year.
Government developers write 1,500 lines of code per year.
See also
