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following four activities:
1. Preparation and Design of the Questionnaire.
We used similar questionnaires to identify a set
of questions.
2. Invitation to Participate. The organizations of
the industrial contact network were invited by
phone (to ask for their availability) and then an
e-mail was sent to provide detailed instructions
on the state of the practice survey and its aim.
The questionnaire and the information related to
it were attached to this e-mail.
3. Collecting. One of the authors collected the
filled in questionnaire that the respondents
returned by e-mail.
4. Analysing. The answers of the collected
questionnaire were analyzed with respect to the
goals of the industrial survey.
We collected 22 questionnaire correctly filled in.
Note that the invited company were 53, thus
obtaining 42% as response rate.
3 ANALYSIS
Due to the nature of our study the analysis is mainly
based on basic descriptive statistics. In the following
we summarize the obtained results according to the
design of the developed survey questionnaire (see
Section 2.3).
3.1 Respondents’ Background and
Companies’ Characteristics
The respondents’ age ranges from 28 to 56 years old
with an average of 41 years. The female are only 5
and the majority of respondents work for a company
located in the South of Italy (15). The companies are
geographically distributed as follows: 16 are from
the south of Italy, 4 are from the central, and 2 are
from the north. Note that southern Italy is better
represented, also because the universities that
conducted the survey are located in southern Italy.
On the other hand, further information on the
respondents and their companies are summarized in
Table 1.
Regarding the role of the respondents, 15 of
them stated that they are project managers, while the
others declared to be developers (2) or architects (4).
Only one respondent involved in the study is a
company administrator. Concerning the education, 3
respondents declared to have a Bachelor degree,
while 18 respondents have a Master degree, and 1
only one respondent has a first level Master’s
degree. None has a PhD. As expected, the majority
of the respondents (17) has a specific IT degree. 14
companies are independent, while 8 are controlled
by a bigger and more powerful company. Among
those companies, 13 are S.p.A, (i.e., companies
quoted on the Italian stock exchange), while 9 are
private companies. With respect to the size of the
companies and according to the recommendation
2003/361/EC (micro companies have less than 10
employees; small companies have from 10 to 50
employees; medium companies have from 50 to 250
employees; large companies have more than 250
employees), 13 of the survey responses come from
small and medium-sized companies and 8 come
from large ones. Only one is a micro company.
Regarding the business units, we have 4 micro, 8
small, and 9 medium sized units. Only 1 can be
considered a large business unit.
Respondents also provided information about the
experience and the education of the employees. The
analysis reveals that on average 11% of the
employees have less than one year of experience,
52% of the employees have less than five years of
experience, and 37% of the employees have more
than five years of experience.
Regarding the education, on average 29% of the
employees have a Bachelor degree, 44% of the
employees have a Master degree, and 27% of the
employees have a High School diploma.
Information on the employees hired during the
last year was also specified by the respondents. In
particular, on average the percentage of employees
with an ICT Bachelor degree hired every year is
40%, while 45 is the percentage of employees with
an ICT Master degree. 15% is the percentage of
employees without an ICT degree on average hired.
Moreover, on average the 68% of the employees
hired during last year had no previous experience in
the ICT field. The remaining (32%) have on average
3 years of experience in the ICT field.
Regarding the industrial domains, about 10 work
in the area of software consultancy. The same
number of companies works as software
house/vendors, while only 2 companies declared to
be Web agency.
Concerning the main activities of the involved
companies, 20 focus on the development and
maintenance of software systems. A company only
focuses on software development.
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