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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.
About 1/4 of all software projects are unable to be delivered, due to changes in requirements, lack of time or resources, or whatever.
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.
Government developers typically write 1,500 lines of code per year.
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