From an article by Brian Gillooly, editor in chief of Optimize Magazine:
"6th Sense Analytics in Morrisville, N.C., has captured the attention of the venture-capitalist community with an on-demand approach that lets IT departments track developers' progress across distributed projects. The automated strategy eliminates human interaction in the monitoring process, reducing the risk of bias or human error. It also provides visibility across multiple vendors' products rather than a single point of view."
“When the 6th Sense Analytics founders presented their company at DEMO, I got a creepy feeling that this was another company using technology to invade privacy. I still have some of that feeling, but I’ve talked to the executives now to hear their side of it.
The tool can turn off its measurement of individuals and instead report collective data on groups. But the manager has the option to choose either way. The list price of the tool is $960 per annual subscription. 6th Sense uses the data from the tools to come up with its own meta data across companies, on an anonymous basis.
It can measure a team as small as a few people or a huge team. The company launched the full tool in September and has paying customers now. They’re finding out things. For instance, they notice that developers often use tools outside of Eclipse to do tasks that could be done within the software tool.
The tool pays off in a 24-hour development cycle that is common where you have programmers in the United States, Russia and China all working on the same code. You can have one team sign off and another pick up.”
You can read Dean’s full post here:
http://www.mercextra.com/blogs/takahashi/
Rob O'neill and E S wrote a recap of Chris Shipley's trip to New Zealand and her thoughts on DEMO 07:
"Shipley, fresh back from Down Under, opened the show with a talk about the power shift now taking place in business and personal computing. Although she didn’t use the term 'power to the people', that is what she implied the shift is all about.
'We are breaking away from putting technology at the centre and we are putting people at the centre who have the authority to influence technology,' Shipley said.
Nevertheless, it will be technology that powers that shift. And, at this year’s conference, new products and technology were proof of that.
For example, 6th Sense Analytics has created a toolset which is designed to address the challenge of distributed networks and distributed projects — 6th Sense Analytics’ technology helps project managers maintain visibility into the progress of any project."
Full article here:
http://computerworld.co.nz/news.nsf/news/15E22ADB0FD9F751CC257276000B56E9
Esther Schindler from CIO Magazine counts 6th Sense Analytics among the new innovations unveiled at DEMO 07 that CIOs should
really care about.
"Every CIO wishes she could judge developer productivity accurately and use the combined project data to determine whether a development team was on track. One tool that may help is 6th Sense which lets you find out what your software developers are really up to by automatically collecting software development data."
Read Esther's full article here:
http://www.cio.com/blog_view.html?CID=28639
eWeek's Michael Vizard says,
"By now everybody and his brother is familiar with the statistics that show how many software development projects fail and our collective abysmal ability to manage these types of projects. But while everybody likes to shake their head in dismay about the problem, very few people seem willing to do anything about it because application development tools are largely built for single users who don't lend themselves to any collective oversight. And because developers themselves don't want to be bothered by having to actually report on their progress or lack thereof, everybody is pretty much in the dark about the status of any given project."
Read his full post.
From the article by Thomas Claburn of InformationWeek:
"6th Sense Analytics presented a promising online service to track software developer productivity. It lets programmers individually, or as a group, measure productivity by monitoring various development tools like Eclipse and other applications. Having automated tools that gather productivity data should make managing dispersed teams of programmers much easier."
Full article here:
http://www.informationweek.com/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=197002257
Dan Farber took notice of 6th Sense Analytics at DEMO 07:
http://blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/?p=4400
Excerpt from
Demo 07 conference: 70 companies hope to please VCs
by Ephraim Schwartz for Infoworld:
"6th Sense Analytics will unveil a data-collection platform for measuring unstructured processes. In its first implementation the technology is targeted at monitoring and measuring software development projects, on or offshore.
With Eclipse as the backbone for most Java development, 6th Sense taps into the infrastructure of all development technologies that plug into Eclipse to give managers an inside look at the status of a project."
Read the full story here:
http://www.infoworld.com/article/07/01/30/HNdemo_1.html
6th Sense Automates Developers Progress Reports
Andy Patrizio at InternetNews.com says "The latest version of 6th Sense Analytics, announced today at the DEMO conference, offers an improved automated method for gathering performance metrics in development projects, without requiring the developer to do a thing. Other than their job, that is."
"Every development organization I've talked to thinks this is exciting," said Carey Schwaber, senior analyst with Forrester Research. "This is a longstanding problem. Managers want metrics, managers' managers want metrics, but no one wants to slow the project down to gather information. There were solutions like this in the past that made it a little easier but no one makes it quite this easy."
Read Andy's full article here:
http://www.internetnews.com/dev-news/article.php/3656726
Neil Adler, Staff Reporter, writes:
"Core Capital Partners is leading a $5 million Series A funding round for 6th Sense Analytics, which has developed a productivity tracking tool for software development projects.
D.C.-based Core Capital, a venture fund with more than $350 million under management, has invested $3.25 million in Morrisville, N.C.-based 6th Sense, a privately held firm founded in 2004."
Full Article Here:
http://washington.bizjournals.com/washington/stories/2007/01/29/daily35.html
