Deathray Research

I had a brief, and pleasant, conversation with tenXer CEO Jeff Ma yesterday.  We talked about metrics, performance improvement and where tenXer is heading. 

Jeff was nice enough to provide a login where I could evaluate tenXer with real data. What I learned (other than that Jeff has been shirking his coding duties) was how the data comes together to provide a useful picture of an engineer’s work. 

Today, tenXer gets three key things right:

1. They make it fun. The emphasis is on positive feedback. There’s a leader board; there’s no loser board. 
2. They make it easy.  There’s no data entry required. It’s generated by your normal work activities.
3. They make it non-threatening.  You own your own data. There’s no big-brother thing going on. 

All are critical to making metrics effective.  The other key take away, is that Jeff and tenXer are dead serious about moving from the high-level data they aggregate today, to the deeper principles of software productivity. I would have known this already, had I read his blog post where he says as much, before blogging that tenXer needs to do this. My bad.  

I was right about one thing, though. These guys are worth keeping an eye on.