Introducing the personal software process

The personal software process (PSP) has been developed by the Software Engineering Institute (SEI) to address the improvement needs of individual software engineers. It should also be of help to small projects and modest-sized software organizations. In a one-semester graduate-level course, engineers are introduced to measurement, planning, and quality control methods. A defined sequence of programming exercises are used to illustrate these methods and the exercise data are used to provide the students with feedback on their performance. The PSP course has been taught at five universities at both the graduate and senior undergraduate level. Various PSP introduction methods have also been tried at four industrial organizations, but the course format has also been found most effective. Results to date indicate that PSP training motivates engineers to use disciplined methods and it helps them to achieve significant quality and productivity improvements. While PSP principles have been demonstrated with software engineering students, their effectiveness has not yet been measured in industrial practice. This paper describes the PSP process, the strategic approach and experience to date.