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6th Sense: Productivity Is More Than a Hunch


By P. J. Connolly
September 1, 2006 — 
Can a manager be an impediment to developer efficiency? According to 6th Sense Analytics, the answer can sometimes be yes.

The company in August took the wraps off its namesake development analysis software as a service, which it says is intended to give managers accurate metrics to help keep developers productive. The service will become generally available in September.

6th Sense CTO and co-founder Todd Olson said the company’s methodology isn’t about counting lines of code or clocking people in and out of projects, but rather about capturing development intangibles, such as finding a developer’s groove of peak performance, what the company calls “flow time.”

Olson noted that most developer tracking relies upon people manually inputting data, which, he argued, fails to give the best available picture of the development process.

The tool is free for individual users; managers and team leaders who want access to the aggregated data have to pay US$80 per user per month. Data can be benchmarked within a shop, or it can be assessed against the results of other organizations using the software. As of mid-August, 126 developers at 30 customer sites were already using the service.

6TH SENSORS
The 6th Sense architecture starts at the developer workstation, with the installation of one or more sensors that hook into the developer’s preferred IDE. Sensors are currently available for Borland’s JBuilder, Eclipse, Emacs, Microsoft’s Visual Studio .NET 2003 and VIM. Sensors for Visual Studio 2005 and JetBrains’ IntelliJ IDEA are under development.

The sensors collect activity data—whether the activity is a file editing session, a code review, a check-in, design time or something else—and send it over a secure connection to the 6th Sense Analytics aggregation server. The activity data is then chunked into five-minute blocks to determine the predominant activity during that period, which 6th Sense refers to as “active time.”

Managers analyzing active time can look at developers in terms of projects, technology, and of course, activity type. The objective in this scheme is to maximize “flow time,” when productivity and quality are at their highest. 6th Sense claims from its observations that this usually amounts to half the total active time expended.

So, if developers are at their most productive about half the time, what’s a manager to do?

The answer may not always be obvious; one anecdote related by 6th Sense CEO and co-founder Greg Burnell concerned a client who noticed productivity was up during his absence.

“We debunked the concept that when the manager’s out of town, nobody works.” He continued by noting that the person in question is now “more aware of the disruptions that he imparts on his development team,” ultimately making him a better manager.


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