6th Sense Analytics Unveils New Version of Award-Winning Solution
New Features Bring Accurate Visibility to the Status and Risk of Software Development Tasks and other Specific Work Items
Morrisville, NC -- June 11, 2007 -- 6th Sense Analytics, Inc., a pioneer in automating software development metrics, today announced it has added significant new features to its award-winning solution. The June release delivers unprecedented visibility into the ongoing status of software development tasks, as well as a basis for estimating and diagnosing why projects miss their deadlines. This new capability builds upon the 6th Sense Analytics solution by providing a more detailed resolution of project work, correlating the data that 6th Sense Analytics automatically collects to the specific tasks, defects, enhancement requests and support issues at the heart of software development projects. The June release also adds several administrative enhancements, including capabilities for monitoring the technical status of data collection, and a more flexible permissions model for enabling and disabling user access to data. 6th Sense Analytics will showcase these new capabilities this week at the Gartner Application Architecture, Development & Integration Summit 2007 in Nashville, Tenn.
"Empirical data is critical to agility in software development," said Matthew Hotle, VP Distinguished Analyst for Gartner. "With consistent measures in place, organizations have the context necessary to make decisions on change and affect a positive outcome. Given that measurement must be a byproduct of the work processes and not a major standalone activity, a system that gathers data in an automated fashion is a key enabler for a software development organization."
Automated Visibility into Project Tasks and other Assigned Work
The 6th Sense Analytics solution allows organizations to automatically collect software development data and delivers immediate insight into the execution of physically distributed software development projects. Previous versions associated this data with individuals, teams and systems (groupings of code artifacts). The June release builds upon this foundation with a more detailed level of resolution into software projects by providing visibility into the effort invested in specific tasks, defects, enhancement requests, and other assigned work items generated by a ticketing system.
"One of the greatest challenges for a project manager is achieving accurate and up-to-date visibility into the status of tasks and other assigned work," said Lynn Hargreaves, director of project and portfolio management for Iconoculture. "The latest release of 6th Sense Analytics is a great tool for addressing this challenge because it provides real-time visibility at the task-level, allowing project managers to quickly and proactively identify potential issues."
Once tasks are assigned, it's often very difficult for managers to assess the progress and status of work. Typically, this requires meetings and "drop-by" visits to get a status update. Both of these approaches are intrusive and distracting and neither yields an empirical view of the status of work. 6th Sense Analytics provides managers an accurate basis for knowing which tasks are on track, which need attention, and the specific work patterns that put assigned work at risk.
High-Precision Project Estimation
Today, estimation is based on subjective, inaccurate data and guesswork, which creates a high degree of risk in software development projects and has implications for cost, compliance, customer retention and overall goodwill. The June release of 6th Sense Analytics provides a new set of capabilities for high-precision project estimation. 6th Sense Analytics measures Active Time, which is the active software development effort taking place within the developer toolset. Active Time provides a richer and more accurate basis for estimation than an elapsed time measure, which is a common proxy for estimating.
By capturing the Active Time going into each task, organizations can leverage 6th Sense Analytics to build a highly reliable library of "proxy" data they can use as a basis for estimating future work. They can also use the solution to measure the available "capacity" of a development team based on the average Active Time contribution of an individual or team of developers. For example, the Active Time of a set of tasks may be 245 Active Hours. If a project manager knows the team capacity is 110 Active Hours per week, he can quickly estimate completion of this work in approximately 2.25 weeks.
Installation and Permissions Enhancements
6th Sense Analytics now includes new installation management capabilities that allow both individual developers and managers of teams to monitor the installation and functioning of data collection. This ensures organizations can trust the quality and completeness of the data that is being collected. New capabilities include an administrative dashboard view into a team's desktop sensor installation with visual indicators about installation status. In addition, developers and managers are alerted via e-mail and a systems tray icon when data collection is interrupted.
Additional administrative enhancements include a more flexible permissions model that allows any number of stakeholders to share the same level of visibility and data access within the 6th Sense Analytics system. This non-hierarchical access model is useful when teams are co-managed. Additionally, permissions can be constrained and individual-level views can be disabled to address sensitivity to data privacy.
"Our vision is to create unparalleled visibility into distributed software development projects," said Todd Olson, co-founder and CTO of 6th Sense Analytics. "This latest release tackles the most challenging aspect of managing software development projects: getting estimates right and accurately understanding the �actual� progress against plan after tasks and other work items have been assigned."
The 6th Sense Analytics Solution
6th Sense Analytics is a powerful and unique software-as-a-service solution for achieving accurate and consistent visibility across distributed software development projects. 6th Sense automatically and unobtrusively collects activity-based data from developer tools and delivers on-demand analytics to individuals and teams. This delivers insight into the time spent on specific activities, and provides a basis for understanding team effort, productivity and overall project velocity -- ensuring software development projects are on time, on budget and on target with business goals. All of this allows software development teams to improve their ability to deliver successful project outcomes, critical to the overall success of a globally distributed software development effort.
About 6th Sense Analytics, Inc.
6th Sense Analytics, Inc., a pioneer in automating software development metrics, gives developers and managers deep insight into their software development process by delivering accurate metrics without interrupting the software development lifecycle or changing the tools used. A 2007 winner of the coveted Jolt Productivity Award, 6th Sense Analytics uses an open and independent architecture that provides visibility into the status of distributed software projects. Founded in 2004 by a team of experienced software development executives, 6th Sense Analytics is a privately held company based near Research Triangle Park, North Carolina.
Previous Post:
6th Sense Analytics Named one of the Tech50