After landing in SFO on Friday, I received word via an alumni email blast that Dr. Randy Pausch passed away at age 47.
For those who don't know Dr. Pausch's story or have not seen his amazing Last Lecture yet, I encourage you to take an hour out of your busy life to view it. I did not personally know or have Dr. Pausch as a professor during my time at CMU. He returned to the university the same year I left. However, I felt a kinship with him given our alumni connection and passion for CMU.
Following Your Dream
A reoccurring theme in his lecture ( and book ) is following your dreams. "If you lead your life the right way, the karma will take care of itself," Pausch said. "The dreams will come to you." And while there is nothing completely new to his message, the style and vigor in which he presents it -- and lives it -- is a great reminder for all of us.
6th Sense Analytics is my dream. For the record to all the big-brother haters out there: spying on people has never been in any of my dreams. I wanted to take a brief moment to thank our customers, investors and employees for helping make my dream a reality. While I'm certainly not disillusioned into thinking that using 6th Sense is life-changing for everyone, I do hope that interacting with us has a small positive impact on people's lives.
- Todd Olson, E'97
In historic news, Borland announced the "first business intelligence (BI) application for application-lifecycle management (ALM)." We applaud Borland's efforts in this area. We absolutely agree with the direction and philosophy behind the change. However, they were a little off in their counting of solutions.
Cast has been in business for years selling software measurement and metrics solutions. SourceIQ is a more recent company, but also beat Borland to market. And of course we've been publicly available for almost 3 years.
The concept of metrics
We've learned from years of speaking with software development organizations that the concept of metrics / measurement is important. However, evolving an organization from intuition-based to fact-based is a huge transition. It certainly takes more than simply a software product to make this transformation.
Despite my tongue-and-cheek introduction, I'm truly excited that Borland is increasing the spotlight on software metrics. Their general approach is very familiar and in our mind the right way to solve the problem. And their marketing machine will bring a lot of visibility to the challenges and appropriate solution. However, I do worry about their ability to execute on the vision of this product.
OpenALM sounds promising, but it's a dream. Go to the website. There are vision statements and manifestos -- no API specifications or supported tool lists. We support over 40 ALM tools and each of them requires knowledge of a completely different API and even technology. In some cases, we've resorted to screen-scraping data from web pages. Borland has an even greater challenge of supporting their own ALM platform while dealing with their competitors' offerings. In our experience each customer has a healthy combination of best-of-breed tools.
Customers don't care about openness. They care about the insights they can derive by harvesting the data out of the tools they chose.
Don't Believe Everything You Read
So don't be deceived by marketing collateral. I'd encourage companies seriously interested in transforming their business to evaluate all the solutions in the marketplace and factor in experience and focus to their decision-making.
6th Sense tooling is in a sensitive space. Allowing others to see what you're doing during the day can make you feel vulnerable. Especially if you don't trust your management. (If that's the case, why are you still there? But that's another post about co-dependency and enabling personalities....)
We've worked very hard to train our customers on the proper use of metrics. Measuring not monitoring. Tracking progress. Burnup charts. Estimation accuracy numbers. Moving past developer optimism ("I know I can make this work!") and to a measure of what's actually done.
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Not enough data
When we started, we only captured data from popular development tools like Microsoft Visual Studio and Eclipse. After about six months of market feedback, it became clear that we needed more. Developers spent a large amount of their time outside of development environments, and our customers felt that this void reduced the ability to take action on the data.
So we built web browser sensors and an operating system level sensor to ensure that we caught 100% of computer time. Problem solved.
Too much data
100% of computer time including 100% of web browsing time just amplified "big brother" objections. Many developers raised violent opposition to the product because it captures all time -- including personal activities. We already had the ability to obfuscate URLs, but it was limited. And there was no way to turn data collection off completely.
A fundamental rule we've lived by is that relying on human interaction is bad.
We didn't want to be plagued by the same challenges as traditional project management solutions. Our goal has always been to get out of the way and reliably collect data. We had many discussions on how to empower developers without becoming a burden.
Inspiring use case: The Independent Contractor
During the time we were designing this new feature area we contracted an individual to help us with a sensor. Of course, he installed our product. I could review his data and get a sense of where the time was being spent -- and even compare it to the bill. One constant challenge was dealing with his "windows media player time." Every night around 7PM, he played music, watched movies. I didn't want to see this. I didn't want to create rules to filter it out. I didn't want to customize reports to exclude it. I simply did not want it at all.
Our Solution
First, despite countless debates the general feeling is that there are times that people want to be completely private. There are instances where it is well known that all the activities on the computer have nothing to do with business. A good example is Private Browsing in Safari. In this case, having the ability to turn "off" data collection is important. The challenge is that folks can forget to turn it back on. Folks will forget to turn it back on. This of course is unacceptable. Therefore, we settled on defaulting the private mode to one hour ( typical lunch break ) and supporting up to four hours ( typical evening ) off.
The other primary use case involves removing known activities that are personal -- e.g. windows media player. This called for a light rules engine to exclude data based on a pattern. Of course, this requires us to have the mechanism to review the data to see which would even apply. Hence, Manual mode was born. Desktops in manual mode just collect data for review. Data can be excluded individually, or rules can be created to bulk exclude.
Once an individual is confident in the data collected and has established appropriate rules, he can switch to automatic mode which submits all non-excluded data every 10 minutes.
Design is about compromise
So we didn't implement a simple "off" button, but we feel we captured the intent of the request and addressed real user issues with this feature set while maintaining our key principles.
To see more of this new feature check out the video here.
I'm pleased to announce we recently posted the newest version of our solution. This release is "special" because we also released a new version of our Desktop (v 4.0.2) and new installer. We are very careful about performing Desktop releases and tend to update it infrequently to limit disruptions for our users.
Instead of simply listing out features in the release, I'm going to introduce them periodically through the blog and screencasts. The first video highlighting the biggest feature, data submission controls, is complete and available below. More information about the thinking behind the feature is on its way as well. Enjoy!
Click to Watch (.swf)
Teach? Coach? Consult? Speak?
A few days ago some of our development team were working hard to keep our automated tests passing. We've been doing some serious development, and it's been real work to get and keep our tests passing. One of team members joked: "it's much easier to just tell someone to test?"
We've all been to the presentations at conferences. We've all read the books on things you "must" do -- the practices you "must" follow. The great thing about being a speaker or author is that it requires no follow-up. They don't write the tests. They don't stay late when the tests fail.
They are not even responsible for their recommendations. What if the practices don't improve the organization? Typically, I've heard pundits blame poor adoption for failures. This was very common in the XP community. I've heard XP consultants say, "you didn't follow all the steps." Of course this is an easy thing to say to a team trying to make a huge change.
It reminds me of the excuses astrologists make when they make poor predictions. An astrologist once told me, "you didn't give me the exact time of birth."
The bottom line is that it's easy to make recommendations -- it's hard to execute them.
Back it up!
We'd encourage teams to require consultants and speakers to back up their recommendations with data. Collect metrics. Demonstrate quantitatively that their ideas and philosophies work.
Our coach, Jared Richardson, isn't afraid to measure his recommendations. As a matter of fact, he requires it. Why spend time ( and money ) enacting change if the downstream effects cannot be proven?
I'd encourage any team that's enacting change to take a baseline and measure the results. Of course using a product like 6th Sense will make the task must easier, but regardless measure the results. This will not only benefit the organization as it strives for improvement, it will keep the consultants/coaches in check.
Once upon a time, a prospect mentioned that his development team would "pass around a hat" if we could automate their timesheets.
Get your hats ready
We recently announced a partnership with Austin-based Journyx. I just posted a video demonstrating the ease in which data from 6th Sense can auto-populate a timesheet.
This integration is perfect for any organization mired with timesheets. It adds no overhead and completely removes the burden from individuals. Please contact us if you'd like to learn more about this exciting integration.
Video
