Three Dimensions of Process Improvement Part II: The Personal Process

Moving from " What " to " How " Although the Capability Maturity Model (CMM) provides a powerful improvement framework, its focus is necessarily on " what " organizations should do and not " how " they should do it. This is a direct result of the CMM's original motivation to support the Department of Defense acquisition community. We knew management should set goals for their software work but we also knew that there were many ways to accomplish these goals. Above all, we knew no one was smart enough to define how to manage all software organizations. We thus kept the CMM focus on goals, with only generalized examples of the practices the goals implied. As organizations used the CMM, many had trouble applying the CMM principles. In small groups, for example, it is not generally possible to have dedicated process specialists, so every engineer must participate at least part time in process improvement. We kept describing to engineers what they ought to do and they kept asking us how to do it. Not only did this imply a need for much greater process detail, it also required that we deal more explicitly with the real practices of development engineers. We needed to show them precisely how to apply the CMM process principles. Because software development is a rich and sophisticated process, we real-Part I of this article (CROSSTALK, February 1998) described the Capability Maturity Model ® , why it was developed, and how it can help organizations improve their performance. Part II addresses the Personal Software Process (PSP) SM , which shows engineers how to perform their tasks in an effective and professional way. In the final analysis, to have high-performance software organizations, you must have high-performance software engineers working on high-performance software teams. The objective of the PSP is to show software engineers how to use process principles in their work. Part III of this article (April 1998 issue of CROSSTALK) describes the Team Software Process, which shows integrated product teams how to consistently produce quality products under aggressive schedules and for their planned costs. Figure 1. The PSP process evolution. ized a single set of cookbook methods would not be adequate. We thus chose to deal with fundamental process principles and to show engineers how to define, measure, and improve their personal work. The key is to recognize that all engineers are different and that each …