Tracking Personal Processes in Group Projects

Software engineering continues to develop methods for process improvement and quality. The Personal Software Process is one way to introduce software engineers to aspects of process tracking, assessment and improvement. In this paper, we describe the software tools that we’ve constructed to support the planning and postmortem of software activities. We describe an approach that allows the personal software process to be used in group projects, while still allowing the individual engineer to employ personal process quality and improvement techniques in their own activities. The tools supporting planning and postmortem are used in the context of a workflow system developed at Arizona State University (ASU), called Open Process Components, whose aim is to componentize software services and provide interoperability among various approaches. These tools and approaches explore software development in the increasingly distributed environment in which the software engineer is responsible for their own assessment