Lessons From a Decade of Data: Part I -- The Risky Business of Predicting the Future

by E.M. Bennatan

We need reliable information to plan well for the future, and Cutter Consortium has been collecting data on trends in the computing industry for many years. In this series of three Executive Updates, we will look back at the past 10 years of Cutter surveys covering most of the key areas in software development. We will select some of the more important findings, and we will discuss how they can help companies prepare for an approaching decade that promises to be even more frenzied than its predecessor.

In this, the first Update in the series, we will discuss some of the most significant issues that have repeatedly emerged in the surveys of the past decade: our changing attitude toward software project requirements and the software market's demand for software products with a short time to market that are more consumer-oriented. We will then attempt to do a little better than Watkins in predicting how these trends will unfold during the coming decade.