Experience Report: Teaching and Using the Personal Software Process (PSP)

PSP is a methodology for an individual software engineer's continuous self-improvement. Currently, few PSP experience reports are available from non-US sources, and hardly any from people other than the PSP inventor Watts Humphrey. We describe independent experiences with PSP. We nd that PSP is a viable and useful approach and has quanti able, positive impact. Problems in teaching PSP are in keeping students motivated and keeping them focused on general ideas instead of details. Problems in using a personal software process are keeping enough self-discipline and nding proper tool support. 1 The Personal Software Process (PSP) The Personal Software Process (PSP) framework is an approach suggested by Watts Humphrey in 1995[1]. It describes a methodology that leads an individual software engineer towards disciplined, well-de ned work with continuous self-improvement. The PSP ideas are independent of programming language, application domain, and team organization; they can be applied to programming as well as to many non-programming tasks. Humphrey suggests to learn PSP in form of a 15 week course (e ort: one 90-minute lecture and one exercise of 3 to 10 hours each week) that trains a set of techniques that form the basis of a personal software process. The student should then vary and optimize these techniques for his/her needs and introduce other techniques if required (therefore the name Personal Software Process). The core ideas of the PSP framework are 1. to base the process on measurements, because \many people have feelings and opinions, but few people have data" (Humphrey) and 2. to make the process well-de ned, because you can only improve what you do if you know what you do. For further details see the appendix. A problem with PSP (and the PSP course) as suggested by Humphrey is that it was more or less designed from the perspective of but a