6th Sense Analytics

Community Trends

One of the powerful byproducts of the 6th Sense Analytics solution is access to community data on an aggregated and de-identified basis--data that reveals the patterns and trends that define the broader software development community. Our customers use this data for performance benchmarking and understanding how they're stacking up to the development community as a whole.

We look forward to sharing this data over time and doing our part in growing the collective intelligence of the software development community.

Process Trends

Most people think developers spend their days developing code, but according to our data, there is more time spent in browsers than in IDEs or Text Editors. Researching and testing are a big part of creating quality software.

Tool Trends

Eclipse and VisualStudio are the dominant IDEs. In fact, they are the only 2 that are significant.

Yahoo is the dominant IM client with MSN Messenger coming on strong. It's interesting that a free multi-protocol client like Trillian doesn't have higher usage.


Surprisingly, text editors are very popular tools. For example: Notepad, Notepad++, EditPlus, and TetPad all have more time than Jbuilder ( the 3rd most used IDE ). This trend is interesting in that beyond Notepad ( which is free and included in Windows ), there's a healthy usage for a number of tools. Many of which are inexpensive tools. Clearly there's a market for a tool that is just a slightly better version of Notepad.