As part of his on-going investigation of IT professionals are actually doing in practice, Dr. Dobb's Senior Contributing Editor Scott Ambler has launched the September 2009 edition of  his State of the IT Union Survey. The goal of this ongoing survey series is to find out what IT professionals are actually doing in practice.

To help with this survey,  go here.

This edition is on the heels of his July 2009 survey which also focused on project management practices, coding conventions, enterprise-wide UI/usability conventions, and the like. Scott summed up the results of the July survey in the August issue of Dr. Dobb's Agile Update.

Again, we're asking for your participation in the current (September) survey. This is important stuff and we value your input. There are only 15 questions on three pages of this survey, it should take you less than 5 minutes to complete  -- and your privacy will be completely protected. Please take a few minutes to participate.

To make it worth your while, Scott is giving you the chance to be entered into a draw for one of five copies of Real-Time Agility: The Harmony/ESW Method for Real-Time and Embedded Systems Development, by Bruce Douglass. In addition, I'm going to toss in five "official" Dr. Dobb's caps -- that's right, those classic baseball caps that are almost impossible to find these days. (You can always tell when I've been cleaning out the warehouse.)

 So five books, five caps, five minutes of your time. Thanks in advance.

The results of this survey will be summarized in a forthcoming issue of Dr. Dobb's Agile Update. Furthermore, this is an open survey, so the source data (without identifying information to protect your privacy), a summary slide deck, and the original source questions will be posted at www.ambysoft.com/surveys/ so that others may analyze the data for their own purposes. Data from previous surveys have been used by university students and professors for their research papers, and hopefully the same will be true of the data from this survey. The results from several other surveys are already posted there, so please feel free to take advantage of this resource.