columns
watts new
Editor’s Note: Since June 1998, Watts Humphrey has taken readers of news@sei and its predecessor SEI Interactive on a process-improvement journey, step by step, in his column Watts New. The column has explored the problem of setting impossible dates for project completion (“Your Date or Mine?”), planning as a team using TSP (“Making Team Plans”), the importance of removing software defects (“Bugs or Defects?”), applying discipline to software development (“Doing Disciplined Work”), approaching managers about a process improvement effort (“Getting Management Support for Process Improvement”), and making a persuasive case for implementing it (“Making the Strategic Case for Process Improvement”). And now, after nearly 11 years, Watts is taking a well deserved retirement from writing the quarterly column. But you can still enjoy vintage Watts New columns, including all of the above topics, in the news@sei archives or in the Watts New Collection.
—Richard Lynch
Editor
news@sei
How Mexico is Doing It
This is the first of a new series of Watts New columns where I invite members of the SEI’s TSP team and others to write about the experiences of TSP users. In general, the audience for these columns is anyone who is interesting in improving the predictability, quality, and productivity of their software and systems work. Occasionally, the articles will be more narrowly focused, but I plan to alert the reader whenever this is the case.
While many of these articles may be co-written with users, this and some others will be written by the SEI staff members alone. In this article, Anita Carleton describes the very impressive efforts being made in Mexico to transform their software industry. Anita is a senior member of the SEI staff where she has worked for over 20 years on software process improvement, process measurement, and the TSP. She is the author of Measuring the Software Process: Statistical Process Control for Software Process Improvement, has a degree in applied mathematics from Carnegie Mellon University, and is a member of IEEE Computer Society and National Defense Industrial Association (NDIA).