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Metrics: Understanding the Software Development Process


DDJ: Today's guest is Todd Olson, CTO of 6th Sense Analytics, a hosted software company that collects metrics needed to understand software development projects.

Todd, is it a challenge to collect meaningful metrics on applications when so many of those applications are distributed across networks that make use of so many third-party components and web services?

TO: The consolidation of the software-development lifecycle toolset has motivated vendors to expose a rich and comprehensive set of APIs for the purpose of integrating their own tools. This created a powerful opportunity for us to tap into these tools to capture meaningful, API-level events about the execution of the software development process. We don't measure coarse-level units such as keystrokes -- in fact, we don't think that sort of data is meaningful. We look at the discrete events and activities that are taking place -- designing, editing, debugging, testing, commits, etc. Our sensor framework is based on Hackystat, an open source project focused on software development measurement. This open framework makes it very easy for us -- and third parties -- to build new sensors. We've published 25-30 sensors and we're adding new ones all the time.

DDJ: Your tools measure two fundamental units -- Active Time and Flow Time. What are these and why are they important?

TO: Time has both a direct and an opportunity cost in software development. Time is a proxy for effort and investment. Active Time is a measure of the time spent in the developer toolset while a team is actively engaged in designing, coding, editing, debugging and testing software. Measuring Active Time enables stakeholders to see where the relative investments are being made across a project. Active Time can be analyzed by system, project, activity, team, individual, tasks, change requests, defects or check-ins. This empowers individual developers to become more informed and reflective about their own work patterns. When the data is aggregated, it provides a basis for understanding relative investments, alignment to best practices and it provides a very powerful basis for proxy-based estimation. When Active Time is correlated to fine-grained work units such as tasks, defects and change requests, you start getting a true sense of the cost of these things and a basis for estimating future work efforts.

Flow Time is a measure of uninterrupted periods of at least 20 minutes engaged in a focused activity. When developers are "in the flow," they are at their height of productivity and creativity; this is when time stops and work becomes all encompassing. Tom DeMarco discusses the notion of Flow in Peopleware and it is becoming an important measure in Agile projects, where organizations are looking to optimize environments for maximum productivity. Measuring Flow Time enables stakeholders to evaluate and take action to correct environmental factors and work conditions that may be getting in the way.

DDJ: From what I've read, your analytic tools sit in the background to collect data. Is this somewhat like having "debug on" which can affect overall application performance?

TO: Our sensors are extremely lightweight, so the impact on performance is negligible. One of our key design principles is to be completely unobtrusive -- both in terms of how we collect data and our impact on their existing toolset. Our sensors are built with this in mind. You can't detect any difference in IDE performance when our sensors are installed.

DDJ: When you launched 6th Sense Analytics, what problem were you looking to solve?

TO: My inspiration for 6th Sense Analytics came from my experience managing a large team of software developers distributed across multiple locations worldwide. It was extremely challenging to manage a team of developers located in such diverse and dispersed geographies. I spent much of my time on airplanes, and even kept an apartment in St. Petersburg, Russia to get a handle on our distributed projects.

At the time, there was no other reliable way to understand the execution of the software development process. We actually reserved the better part of a day per week to stop development work and report out on progress. This is an untenable situation because of both the cost and inaccuracy of the data collection method. My insight from this experience was that automation could be applied to the problem: Integrate with the toolset and capture events about the execution of the development process and use this as the basis for an analytics solution for distributed software development. This was the inspiration for 6th Sense Analytics. Organizations are using the solution for planning and estimation, resource allocation, benchmarking, and as an "early warning" system into project risks. Individual developers use it as a way to self manage, improve their work processes, and as a basis for meetings and time reporting.

DDJ: Is there a web site that readers might go to for more information on these topics?

TO: Absolutely! The 6th Sense Analytics site has a great deal of information about our approach, and resources about metrics and measurement in general.


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