Introducing Personal Software Process in a Swedish Company.

Terttu Orci: Introducing Personal Software Process in a Swedish Company CSIT 1999 : 73-79

Abstract

PSP - Personal Software Process - is a framework for improvement of the professional skills of software engineers. It provides a stepwise improvement approach, much like CMM with its maturity levels, with the continuous improvement as the highest level on the ladder. PSP has so far been introduced mainly in a laboratory environment, in an educational setting with software engineering students as objects for study, but also a few studies have been published on PSP introduction to software engineers in industry. The results are impressive in terms of decreased defect density, increased percentage of defects found before compiling, and improved estimation accuracy. PSP prescribes a way of working, tailored to an individual and his needs and preferences. However, the initial training in terms of a two weeks full-time course, as given by the Software Engineering Institute (SEI), is probably more than at least small companies can afford. An interesting question is whether there are other forms for introducing PSP in industry, which would still give much of the benefits, but being more realistic for small and medium size software companies. In front of a larger study with the intention to experiment with different course forms, we have introduced PSP to the two software engineers in a small company, in order to get some initial knowledge and experience of the problems which might arise when giving a course in an industrial setting. The results were encouraging, though not measured quantitatively, but rather as a change in the attitudes of the software engineers participating in the course.

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Printed Edition

Ch. Freytag and V. Wolfengagen (Eds.): CSIT'99, Proceedings of 1st International Workshop on Computer Science and Information Technologies, January 18-22, 1999, Moscow, Russia. MEPhI Publishing 1999, ISBN 5-7262-0263-5

Electronic Edition