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6th Sense Analytics, a software-as-a-service (SaaS) company that produces tools for collecting and analyzing software development metrics, has announced a new release of its software that lets you correlate the activity-based data that is automatically collected with the specific tasks, tickets, defects, enhancement requests, and support issues at the heart of software development projects.

This capability builds on 6th Sense Analytics' current toolset by providing a detailed resolution of project work, providing an accurate view into the execution of discrete tasks, and other specific work items. The release also adds support for Microsoft Team Foundation Server, Microsoft Office Suite; and significant administrative enhancements, including capabilities for monitoring the technical status of data collection, and a more flexible permissions model for enabling and disabling user access to data.

"Empirical data is critical to agility in software development," said Gartner analyst Matthew Hotle. "With consistent measures in place, organizations have the context necessary to make decisions on change and affect a positive outcome. Given that measurement must be a by-product of the work processes and not a major standalone activity, a system that gathers data in an automated fashion is a key enabler for a software development organization."

For more information on the importance of collecting metrics, see the Dr. Dobb's interview with CTO Todd Olsen entitled Metrics: Understanding the Software Development Process.

To illustrate, one area of software development in which collecting metrics is invaluable has to do with project estimation. It is generally accept that poor estimation is responsible for the majority of software development project failures, and most estimates are based on subjective, inaccurate data, guesswork, and gut-feel intuition. This is one of the areas that the new release of 6th Sense Analytics addresses by providing a new set of capabilities for high-precision project estimation.

According to Olsen, 6th Sense Analytics measures "Active Time," which is the active software development effort taking place within the developer toolset. Active Time provides a richer and more accurate basis for estimation than an elapsed time measure, which is a common proxy for estimating today. By capturing the Active Time going into each task, organizations can leverage 6th Sense Analytics to build a library of "proxy" data they can use as a basis for estimating future work. Additionally, the tool provides visibility into the available "capacity" of a development team based on the average Active Time contribution of an individual or team of developers. For example, the Active Time sum of a set of tasks may be 245 Active Hours. If project managers know that their team capacity is 110 Active Hours per week, they can quickly estimate completion of this work in approximately 2.25 weeks. Once the project begins, the tool provides the in-process visibility managers need to assess whether the work is on track or at risk.

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