By now everybody and his brother is familiar with the statistics that show how many software development projects fail and our collective abysmal ability to manage these types of projects. But while everybody likes to shake their head in dismay about the problem, very few people seem willing to do anything about it because application development tools are largely built for single users who don't lend themselves to any collective oversight. And because developers themselves don't want to be bothered by having to actually report on their progress or lack thereof, everybody is pretty much in the dark about the status of any given project.

This issue has been further exacerbated by the advent of global software development that results in teams of developers being strewn around the globe with little to no effective oversight. This then results in a batch job approach to development where development teams dutifully take down the specifications associated with a given software project and then ship back their best guess of what that application is supposed to look like. This process is then repeated a few dozen times over until something reasonably close to the goal starts to emerge a few months late.

Against that background a relatively new software-as-a-service offering has emerged to provide a new distributed infrastructure for tracking software development projects that promises to be relatively simple to deploy in addition to being unobtrusive to the average developer. The 6th Sense Solution from 6Th Sense Analytics that is being demonstrated this week at the Demo conference inserts a piece of code into the development environment being used by the developer. It then keeps track of changes and updates to the work being done by that developer and relays that information back to a central hub that comes complete with all kinds of analytical tools that can be used by project managers to compare the progress of multiple teams of developers.

From the perspective of the individual developer, there is probably a big brother aspect to this service that is not going to be enthusiastically received. But when you look at the billions of dollars being wasted on software development projects, a tool that costs $960 per user per year is pretty hard to argue with. The fact of the matter is that the vast majority of the assets of most companies in business today are tied up in their IT applications, and anything that offers the potential to bring some order to the chaos that mars most application development projects may not be welcomed by everybody equally, but it sure is needed.