The Playpen Blind Spot
It's remarkable how much our customers inform our product direction. A perfect example of this was a call we got from a customer who was trying to gain visibility into a classic blind spot in software development: The playpen (or sandbox) environment. The interesting thing about this request wasn't the uniqueness of the requirement�of course, this is a challenge that most development organizations face. It was the fact that they were ready to do something about it and they knew 6th Sense could help.
Local development work creates a blind spot in the development process. Code in the playpen isn't visible downstream or accessible for the purpose of dependency and impact analysis. This is why many organizations institute policies on frequent check-ins. But the reality is that policies aren't always followed, particularly during spikes in workloads and mad rushes to meet tight deadlines. But even when developers do check in on time, they often only check in a subset of their code -- the code they believe is mature enough to commit.
The result of all of this is an accumulation of code that isn't visible within the development process. This has implications for downstream demand planning and for impact and dependency analysis. At some point in time, much of this playpen code will be checked in, creating a cascading series of unfortunate events. Of course, when new code is merged into the build, things break. It's no wonder because dependencies simply aren't visible. And of course there's the classic case of the tidal wave crashing down on the testing group. The story is always the same: QA never saw it coming!
6th Sense Analytics has developed a new view into the amount of code and time investment that is going into locally stored artifacts -- we can show you exactly what is happening in local playpen environments. The insight this creates is stunning: QA engineers and the rest of the team have the upstream visibility they need to anticipate what's coming down the pike. And managers can mitigate the cumulative risk of excessive local code build up. Without 6th Sense, this sort of visibility is simply unachievable.
Here is an example of the playpen chart provided by the 6th Sense Analytics solution:
What's the impact of the playpen blind spot on your team? How would this sort of visibility help you?
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