StickyMinds' Linda Hayes has posted "Automatic Metrics: Turn Down the Volume and Increase Awareness."
"After more than twenty years in the software development business, I have not found a way to measure developers that is objective, unobtrusive, and meaningful. Until now, that is.
The company 6th Sense Analytics offers an innovative new technology that allows customers to track a set of common development activities, such as checking code in or out, automatically in the background. The company supports "sensors" for a wide range of development tools that measure what the company calls Active Time and Flow Time. Active Time is the time spent constructing software, and Flow Time is an uninterrupted period of at least twenty minutes during which a developer is likely operating at peak efficiency."
James Surowiecki's great book The Wisdom of Crowds popularized the idea that the best answers lie in the community--none of us is as good as all of us. This is one of the founding principles behind the 6th Sense Analytics solution; our goal was to bring visibility to the software development process and to provide a basis for better understanding what has traditionally been a fairly murky discipline.
One of the powerful byproducts of the 6th Sense Analytics solution is access to community data on an aggregated and de-identified basis--data that reveals the patterns and trends that define the broader software development community. Our customers use this data for performance benchmarking and understanding how they're stacking up to the broader development community.
We look forward to sharing this data over time and doing our part in growing the collective intelligence of the software development community. By the way, I'm Greg Burnell. I'm co-founder and CEO of 6th Sense Analytics and an aspiring blogger. I look forward to talking to you over the coming weeks and hearing from you--as my comments either inform or infuriate.
Dana Gardner has posted his insights on 6th Sense Analytics' release of aggregated community data on his Zdnet blog:
"I wrote about 6th Sense Analytics as the company was emerging, and wondered how powerful the developer productivity measurement tools they offer would be if the data could be aggregated and larger use trends could be uncovered.
Well, some of the first community insights have arrived and they are quite interesting."
Visit Dana's blog for the rest of the story.
I had the pleasure to attend the 2nd Barcamp here in Raleigh-Durham at Red Hat's campus. After a great experience last year that provided me with new relationships and great inspiration, I'm pleased that the sequel lived up to the original.
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SoftwareBusinessOnline.com is featuring an article penned by 6th Sense CEO Greg Burnell. Greg's article explores the software industry's natural instinct to fear outsourcing and how organizations can "mitigate the risks by insisting offshore partners provide consistent and empirical metrics as the vital indicators of the progress and productivity of outsourced processes."
Major Global Product Developer Latest to Adopt Award-winning Software Development Metrics Solution
Morrisville, NC -- July 9, 2007 -- 6th Sense Analytics, Inc., a pioneer in automating software development metrics, announced today that its solution has been selected by GlobalLogic, a Vienna, VA-based global product development services firm with development centers in the US, India and Eastern Europe. 6th Sense Analytics automates the collection of software development metrics, helping organizations bring physically distributed projects into focus. GlobalLogic is implementing 6th Sense Analytics as a key part of its distributed Agile method, Velocity™ and open source platforms, providing deeper visibility into the status, progress and risk of distributed software development processes for the company and its clients.
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Burnell to Address Distributed Projects, Offshoring and Outsourcing and SaaS Opportunities
Morrisville, NC -- July 2, 2007 -- 6th Sense Analytics, Inc., a pioneer in automating software development metrics, today announced that co-founder and CEO Greg Burnell will present at the 2007 Enterprise Innovations conference sponsored by Dow Jones & Company. The conference brings together high-profile start-ups, venture capitalists and leading industry executives to discuss high-level trends influencing development and acquisition strategies in the enterprise space. Mr. Burnell will discuss the growth and evolution of 6th Sense Analytics, covering such topics as the need for automation as a basis for managing distributed software development projects; the emergence of trust and transparency as barriers to success in offshoring and outsourcing; and the new opportunities created by the software-as-a-service (SaaS) model.
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Sandhill.com, a website dedicated to the discussion of strategy for software executives, has posted an article by 6th Sense Analytics' CEO Greg Burnell titled "No Left Turns."
"A key part of optimizing software development processes is helping organizations to understand the use of time. How much time is spent actively coding, debugging, building, testing software? What is the relative allocation of time across projects? This empowers organizations to align resources to the highest yield outcome. What is the value of time for a software developer? It�s nothing short of everything. Time spent out of alignment is more or less wasted�direct and opportunity cost incurred and all value forgone. Time spent executing on the things that matter most to the business is as MasterCard says: Priceless."
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ENT News Online has posted a mention of our new support for Microsoft Team Foundation Server and Microsoft Office.
"App-dev metrics vendor 6th Sense Analytics Inc. has announced that its Web-hosted service now integrates with Team Foundation Server and Microsoft Office."
Automated Solution for Software Development Metrics Captures Data from Microsoft Visual Studio Team Foundation Server and Microsoft Office Applications
Morrisville, NC -- June 19, 2007 -- 6th Sense Analytics, Inc., a pioneer in automating software development metrics, today announced integration with Microsoft Visual Studio Team Foundation Server and the Microsoft Office system. 6th Sense Analytics users can immediately download and install sensors to capture data from these tools to achieve broader visibility into distributed software development projects. Support for Microsoft Team Foundation Server and Microsoft Office applications expands upon the .NET developer tool support currently provided by 6th Sense Analytics, which includes Microsoft Visual Studio, Microsoft Visual SourceSafe, Microsoft Internet Explorer, and Microsoft Visual Basic.
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