Despite the downturn in the overall economy, budgets for IT dev projects are on the rise in 2009, according to the majority of senior business leaders and software development professionals surveyed by IDC.

Approximately 60% of the 6,000 respondents told IDC researchers that their development budgets are increasing, according to the survey, sponsored by SoftServe Inc. One-fourth of respondents (26%) said their budgets had increased more than 10 percent over 2008 expenses.

“During this economic recession, the competitive application outsourcing arena has become even more fierce as customers push for lower cost and improved operational efficiencies. Flexible, consistent delivery and management models, alongside scalability, reliability and high performance, will be critical as new hosting models become viable alternatives to the enterprise,” said Rona Shuchat, director of Application Outsourcing Services at IDC, in a statement.

Other key takeaways from the IDC survey include:

• 38% of companies are outsourcing “some software development” to India, Ukraine, China and other Eastern European countries;
• 71% of respondents said new product or software development was a “top priority” for their organization;
• 51% of respondents said “saving money” was a top priority for their organization;
• 42% of respondents said agile methodologies were their software development models of choice;
• 36% of companies use Capability Maturity Model Integration as their process maturity and quality model;
• 25% of companies use Six Sigma; 62% of respondents focus their software development efforts on enterprise applications;
• 51% of respondents focus their software development efforts on Web-based applications;
• 42% of organizations execute software customization and integration in different systems and environments.

The online survey of trends in the broader software development industry was conducted from April-June 2009. Respondents were professionals from independent software vendors, enterprises with more than 500 employees, small-to-medium enterprises with less than 500 employees and other organizations for which software development was a key business focus or priority.

“Even amidst reports of global economic uncertainty and confusion, many companies are choosing to steel themselves for recovery by investing more, not less, in business-critical software development initiatives,” said Taras Kytsmey, president, SoftServe, in the statement. SoftServe provides ISVs a variety of software lifecycle services, including application development, product testing and maintenance services.

IDC is a provider of IT marketing intelligence and research, and is a subsidiary of International Data Group.