TSP Executive Strategy Seminar

This one-day introductory course for software executives and middle managers covers the key concepts and principles of the Team Software Process (TSP) and Personal Software Process (PSP) from a management perspective. The purpose of the course is to provide the foundation that managers need to begin to introduce and apply the TSP in their organization.

Organizations that develop software recognize that controlling their software process significantly affects their ability to be successful in business. However, organizations still struggle when trying to apply disciplined methods in the software process. Historically, this struggle has been due to a lack of operational procedures that teams and individuals can use to develop software in a disciplined fashion.

The TSP was designed to provide both a strategy and a set of operational procedures using disciplined software process methods at the individual and team levels. At the individual level, the PSP shows managers and engineers how and why to plan and track their projects, demonstrates the principles and benefits of effective quality management, and involves the engineers in process measurement, management, and improvement. At the team level, the TSP builds accurate, achievable plans for software projects teams, provides a formal team-building process, and provides the mechanism for tracking progress against project plans.

Who should attend?

• executives and middle managers who are responsible for software development or maintenance
• managers who are responsible for software support areas such as software quality assurance, software engineering process groups, systems or hardware engineering, documentation, or finance

Topics

• a strategic perspective of the software business, its problems and possible solutions to those problems
• an overview of the PSP and how it provides a means for introducing sound engineering practices into software engineering work
• an overview of the TSP and how it works to build self-directed, high-performance teams
• rational management (managing with facts and data) and why this type of management is required to maintain successful TSP teams
• quality during software development, how TSP teams manage development quality and produce quality products
• introducing TSP into an organization

Objectives

• describe the basic concepts on which the TSP is built
• describe how the TSP can effectively improve software development activities and provide positive motivation for engineers and project teams
• show how to use the TSP to address current and future software needs
• describe how to successfully introduce and maintain TSP
• show what management must do to help their teams be successful

Prerequisites

A reading assignment, to be completed prior to the first day of the course, will be sent to TSP Executive Strategy Seminar attendees after registration. Details will be mailed along with the course text book.

Materials

After registering for the TSP Executive Strategy Seminar, attendees receive a copy of the book Winning with Software: An Executive Strategy by Watts S. Humphrey (ISBN 0-201-77639-1). An accompanying letter details the pre-course reading assignments. It is important that the assigned chapters are read before coming to the course. Students are given a course notebook during the course.

Schedule

This one-day course meets from 8:30 a.m.-5:00 p.m.