Personal Software Process Technology: An Experiential Report

Process improvements within software development occur at three different levels: the organizational level, the project/team level, and at the individual engineer -or personal -level. The Software Engineering Institute (SEI) of Carnegie Mellon University has developed process improvement models tailored to each of these levels. The Capability Maturity Model (CMM) deals with organization issues, the Team Software Process (TSP), currently under validation testing, address improvements in project or team development processes, and the Personal Software Process (PSP). The focus of this paper is on individual software engineer’s issues addressed by the PSP. The Personal Software Process (PSP) provides a framework that individual software engineers can use to define, instrument, and continuously improve their individual processes. After five years of experience in teaching PSP in both academic and industry settings, we have gained some insights into the challenges and rewards of transitioning this technology into an organization’s software development practices. Our industrial experiences included work with the Motorola Paging Products Group; Boeing Corporation’s Space Division and the Naval Oceanographic Office (NAVO). In this paper, we will relate our experiences with the transition of PSP technology into these three organizations. We will describe various approaches taken with industrial PSP training, and report data to validate the benefits of PSP. We will further describe some barriers to PSP training, the challenges of post-training activities, and offer conclusions about the transition process.