Defusing Big Brother Fears: Putting Developers Back in Control
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.
But developers still tend to mistrust anything that allows others to see what they do. (No wonder pair programming hasn't caught on!) Everyone loves our reports, from CTOs to developers, but developers didn't trust any tool that collected this much data.
So we listened to your concerns. We've added several features in that put the developer in control of what data gets saved. So we still get the best of breed data collection and reporting, but developers have control over what gets uploaded.
We've added an off button. More of an off timer really. You turn off all 6th Sense data telemetry for 1 to 4 hours. So if it's lunch time and you want to catch up on your ESPN.com or Slashdot.org time, turn off 6th Sense for an hour. If it's 6 pm and you want to stop recording, hit the 4 hour button. But tomorrow morning, you won't have to remember to turn it back on. It'll come back on automatically.
Data filtering is the other feature we've added. When you upload your data interactively you get to look at and approve every bit of data that goes to the server. We've made it very easy to use. You can even add rules based on a data entry (a particular website or tool for instance) and eliminate it from any future report.
So you'll control what gets uploaded. And by allowing developers to remove the cruft from their data, managers get a more focused report (with a better signal to noise ratio).
We've never wanted 6th Sense to be a "big brother" tool. And these new features should help defuse any fears you might've had about the tool being abused.
Ready to see where your team is on the current project? Come give us a try.
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Design Decision: Controlling Data Submission
