Software engineering economics
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Software engineering economics is the economics of the software industry.
[edit] 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.
[edit] Micro economics
About 1/2 of all software projects are cancelled by users who change their minds, whether or not the software engineers would have succeeded.
About 1/4 of all software projects are unable to be delivered, due to changes in requirements, lack of time or resources, or other reasons.
About 1/4 of all software projects are delivered successfully.
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%.
This explains why open-source / free software is not a major economic threat to commercial software. The cost of commercial software is only 20-30% of the cost to the company. If the commercial software comes with any guarantees about support or maintenance, it easily covers the cost. Most of the cost of software for a company or organization is in training, deployment, and support.
Commercial developers typically write 12,000 lines of code per year[citation needed].
Government developers typically write 1,500 lines of code per year[citation needed].
