The Personal Process in Software Engineering
Watts S. Humphrey
The personal software process (PSPSM) provides software engineers a way to improve the quality, predictability, and productivity of their work. It is designed to address the improvement needs of individual engineers and small software organizations. A graduate level PSP course has been taught at six universities and the PSP is being introduced by three industrial software organizations. The PSP provides a defined sequence of process improvement steps coupled with performance feedback at each step. This helps engineers to understand the quality of their work and to appreciate the effectiveness of the methods they use. Early experience with the PSP shows that average test defect rate improvements of ten times and average productivity improvements of 25% or more are typical.