Twitter Inc has announced that it has acquired TenXer, a San Francisco-based collaboration platform for developers and engineers. TenXer was created in 2011 by Jeff Ma, an engineer and math genius who gained renown as a member of the MIT Blackjack Team that inspired the film 21, a 2008 movie starring Kevin Spacey and Laurence Fishburne. Ma confirmed the acquisition in a Tweet yesterday, saying, “Excited to announce the @tenxer team will be joining @twitter!!!”

TenXer, which is pronounced ten-ex-r due to its promise to make work “10x better than the average,” is a collaboration platform that makes managing engineering projects easier by tracking team progress, both as a whole and as individuals. The service is capable of interfacing with existing data from tools like Pivotal, JIRA OnDemand, and GitHub, and it provides several metrics and trend graphs, as well as the ability to run team meetings, identify coaching opportunities, and share comments between team members.

According to The Wall Street Journal, roughly half of Twitter’s worldwide employees are engineers, leaving the company with formidable challenges in project management. With Twitter pushing for new features and site improvements, as well as its growing focus on multimedia such as Vines and the recently acquired Periscope, it is easy to see the benefits the microblog might gain from a management tool like TenXer.

Ma told Techcrunch that TenXer will be ceasing independent operations. “We will be shutting down tenXer and continuing our work within Twitter,” Ma said. “We are excited to apply what we’ve learned in the last three years to a world-class engineering organization.”

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