One of the key questions development managers need to answer is, "Am I properly allocating resources against my project priorities?" Typically, this question is answered based on gut-feel intuition or stale data. 6th Sense Analytics give you up-to-date visibility into the effort and investments being made in the context of your software development processes. You get the information you need to focus resources on the highest priority areas of the project.
Tasks, change requests and defects are the standard assigned units of work in a software development project. In many organizations, there is no visibility into these work items until they're closed out. And even when "percent completed" is captured in a project management tool, it is usually a guess. How, then, do organizations understand the status of assigned work? 6th Sense Analytics provides a means for understanding the actual time being invested in these items. This provides an "early warning system" for keeping projects on track, and an accurate basis for estimating the scope of future work efforts. The result is a more informed project team with better insight into the effort expended and velocity of work.
One of the goals of a development manager is to ensure that the work environment is conducive to highly productive and focused software development. But the reality is that today's environments are often "interrupt-driven" -- meetings, e-mail, instant messaging and drop-bys lead to a less focused and less effective development teams. 6th Sense Analytics enables you to measure Flow Time to understand the uninterrupted cycles your teams are able to achieve and to assess the nature and conduciveness of your teams' work environment.
Traditional software project management methods don't accurately reveal the patterns and sequence of activities occurring within a project. It's often very difficult to accurately answer the questions, "How much time is being spent debugging versus editing of code"? And, "Are we generating new code after feature freeze"? Not being able to answer these questions can lead to higher costs, poor product quality, and excessive rework downstream. 6th Sense Analytics provides information that reveals when and where investments are being made so you and your team can ensure that methods and best practices are being followed.
"How long will it take to build this feature"? Most developers and managers answer this question based on elapsed time, because this is the traditional frame of reference for software development. Projects start, effort is expended, and projects stop. And in the absence of another unit of measure, elapsed time becomes a proxy for effort. But elapsed time is a very inaccurate proxy for estimating the time it will take to build software. Elapsed time estimates typically over or under account for multi-tasking and environmental distractions. The Active Time unit of measure that 6th Sense Analytics uses brings a very accurate and empirical basis for understanding the effort it takes to develop software. And this makes estimating more authentic and fact-based.
6th Sense Analytics provides visibility into the tools that are being used and the technologies that are being worked on. This gives you insight on the relative levels of tool adoption and where your organization should invest and disinvest to rationalize their toolset. It also ensures that managers understand the blend of technologies that are being used within your organization. This is empowering information as a basis for staffing projects with the developers with rich experience in a specific technology, and also for understanding skills requirements when hiring new developers or engaging with an outsource development firm.
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. The result of all of this is an accumulation of code that isn't visible within the development process. This is particularly problematic for the QA function; a lack of upstream visibility means QA engineers can't effectively predict or plan for impending demand. 6th Sense Analytics uniquely provides visibility into the amount of code and time investment that is going into locally stored artifacts, revealing exactly what is happening in local playpen environments.
