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Updated Tool Gives Managers 6th Sense


By Alex Handy
June 15, 2007 — 
One doesn’t have to be a good manager to tell if employees are doing their jobs. But having deep insight into what it is, exactly, that each developer is actually working on can turn one into a great manager. That’s why on June 11, 6th Sense Analytics updated its SaaS-based software development analytics tools to focus on projects as a whole, giving managers further illumination as to which tasks are taking developers the longest to finish.

6th Sense is a hosted application that communicates with plug-ins that work with more than two dozen IDEs. This plug-in tracks all of the actions taken by a developer during his or her workday. Todd Olson, 6th Sense’s co-founder and CTO, explained that the product measures two types of activity in the IDE: active time and flow time.

The first of those measurements monitors the actual work being done inside and outside the browser: Is the developer awake, typing, moving the mouse and interacting with the repositories? The second of those metrics kicks in only once the developer has hit his or her stride.

“This comes out of a lot of academic research, which says that when a knowledge worker is focused for 20 minutes or more on a project, they’re in the flow [and] they’re fully immersed,” said Olson. “We’re measuring these flow-time units. This can also help you determine whether or not there are environmental issues that are causing distractions.”

HOW’S EVERYBODY DOING?
Since the software is offered as a service, anyone on the development team can log in and check in on his or her own productivity. Those higher in the development cycle can see the broader view. Olson observed that developers and managers could put this information to use when estimating their next project.

In the new version of the 6th Sense analytical system, Olson and team have added fine-grained project monitoring, which gives the software the ability to monitor specific tasks within a project. When an enhancement request for a specific project is made, the developers who are working on the task are then monitored and associated with that project in the metrics collected by 6th Sense.

Olson stated that the 6th Sense Analytics package costs US$960 per user per year. He added that the software-as-a-service, or SaaS, model allows the product to easily work with distributed development teams. “This provides full visibility into what’s going on, what investments people are making globally, without burdening people,” he noted. “Teams are getting more accurate visibility into [how a] project works.”

Eclipse, NetBeans and Visual Studio are among the IDEs into which 6th Sense can be plugged. The company (www.6sa.com) also offers a plug-in development kit if needed to use one’s preferred IDEs with the system.


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