TSP and PSP Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)
Will TSP Work in My Organization
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TSP and Other Models and Methodologies
Building a Case for TSP
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Training
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Using TSP
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For More Information
A. Questions About Will TSP Work in My Organization?
A1. Does the TSP allow for variations in environments, styles, languages, and tools?
A2. Does the TSP integrate the customer into the process?
A3.Does the PSP facilitate component-based development and reuse?
A4. Does the TSP provide or facilitate the development of processes where there are none?
A5.Does the PSP/TSP facilitate the discovery and dissemination of best practices? Does it integrate PDCA (Plan-Do-Check-Act) or other process improvement models? Does it integrate just-in-time training or event-driven learning?
A6. Is the TSP evolving? What improvements are being made to the model?
A7. Isn't the TSP a heavy DoD methodology?
A8. Is TSP adaptable? Will it work in our fast-paced, ever-changing environment?
A9. How much of this is just academic? Are any real companies using the TSP?
A10. Don’t you have to have a mature organization to use TSP?
A11. Don’t you have to have a large organization, team, or project to benefit from TSP?
A12. Does TSP support risk management?
A13. How will TSP help us execute our other improvement priorities?
A14 Can the PSP and TSP work with iterative development processes and prototyping? I have seen several references to “waterfall,” but when I look at the model, it seems that it could be adaptable and work well with iterative development. Does it have to conform to any specific life-cycle model? Or by waterfall, are you just meaning the TSP processes are waterfall?
B. Questions About TSP and Other Models and Methodologies
B1. Will my organization need to adopt CMMI in order to benefit from PSP/TSP?
B2. Is TSP Compatible with CMMI and other CMMs?
B3. Do you have any information about how TSP can be used with CMMs?
B4. Is the PSP beneficial in an already mature (CMM Level 5) organization? If so, how can it best be implemented?
C. Questions About Building a Case for TSP
C1. What is the payback period?
C2. What are the benefits of using the TSP?
C3. Isn't TSP hard to implement?
C4. How will the TSP help staff do their jobs every day?
C5. How does the TSP help managers?
C6. I’m sold on TSP, but I need some data to use to convince my managers. Do you have anything that might help?
D. Questions About Training
D1.The application for instructor training must be received 60 days prior to instructor training but your schedule lists instructor training available 30 days after PSP I and II training. Is it possible to complete the training in three months?
D2. Is it important that I attend launch coach training soon after my other PSP training? If my group doesn’t plan to launch until next year, and I have to train everyone in PSP first, then won’t it benefit me more if I attend launch coach training closer to the time that I will actually be applying it?
D3. How do I become an authorized PSP instructor?
D4. What kind of support do SEI Partners offer for TSP?
D5. Is the Executive Seminar a one-day or two-day class?
D6. Which courses require attendees to bring a laptop computer?
E. Questions About Using TSP
E1. Some defects were found in requirements inspection. Should all defects be logged or only major defects?
E2. Who should be included on the team?
E3. Do you know of a source where I could find the average lines of code per day produced by an average programmer?
E4. Once agreement to pursue PSP and TSP is obtained, what is a typical time line for launching the first pilot TSP team?
E5. In the past year I have been unable to do a TSP launch and therefore am going to go past my one-year authorization probation period next month. What it will take to get me to a state where I will be able to do my first launch and be observed?
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A. Answers About How TSP Will Work in My Organization
A1. Does the TSP allow for variations in environments, styles, languages, and tools?
Yes, the TSP is language and environment independent. The TSP is being used by teams in different organizations with widely varying environments and tools. The PSP course provides training on how to adapt TSP/PSP processes and measures to any structured task.
A2. Does the TSP integrate the customer into the process?
The TSP supports customer needs through the requirements elicitation and review process, prototyping and iterative development, and regular customer status meetings. Also, in the TSP, one team member takes on the role of customer interface manager and is responsible for maintaining a focus on the customer’s needs.
A3. Does the PSP facilitate component-based development and reuse?
In the PSP, planning begins by producing a conceptual design and identifying the opportunities for using or building reusable components. Estimating includes an estimate of the reusable components and the components that will be built to be reused. Two measures are included for tracking reuse: %Reuse (percentage of code that was reused) and %NewReuse (percentage of code that was built to be reused).
A4. Does the TSP provide or facilitate the development of processes where there are none?
First, both PSP and TSP provide processes to guide development that teams often choose to use. Further, PSP/TSP have a defined approach for process development and enhancement. Team members record their process improvement proposals on a form (form PIP). During specific steps in the PSP and/or TSP process such as the launch or postmortem, individuals/teams review the PIPs and identify processes that need to be developed or improved. This work is then planned and executed by the team or is handed off to the SEPG or similar group. More important than mechanics of process development, the PSP/TSP create an environment where processes are routinely developed and used.
A5. Does the PSP/TSP facilitate the discovery and dissemination of best practices? Does it integrate PDCA (Plan-Do-Check-Act) or other process improvement models? Does it integrate just-in-time training or event-driven learning?
The PSP's emphasis on the collection and analysis of data is the basis for the answer for all of these questions. How do you know something is a best practice? Data. What does “Check” mean in PDCA? Analyze the data. How do you know you’re really learning and improving? Data. Also, with the PSP, data-driven feedback and learning are occurring daily or weekly. The principles outlined for PSP also scale up to the team level with TSP.
A6. Is the TSP evolving? What improvements are being made to the model?
New process extensions and updates to the existing processes, courses, and other materials are ongoing. Extensions and updates include TSP version 4.0 (update to the TSP), TSP Secure, and TSP COTS. The SEI is also doing research in TSP extensions for software security and for software acquisition.
A7. Isn't the TSP a heavy DoD methodology?
This is a common misconception. TSP has been presented at key “agile” conferences such as Agile Universe, SD West, SD East, and the USC agile symposium. At each conference, key proponents of agile methods declared TSP to be an agile methodology.
A8. Is TSP adaptable? Will it work in our fast-paced, ever-changing environment?
On their second TSP project, EBS changed nearly everything: platform (from DEC to PC), operating system (from VMS to Windows), language (from C to Java), and design methodology (from functional specification to OO using UML). The system was delivered in three iterations of about one year each. Acceptance test and installation in a world-wide 24/7 trading network was trouble-free.
A9. How much of this is just academic? Are any real companies using the TSP?
TSP was designed for industrial use, tested in industry settings, and is in use in a growing number government and industry organizations. The academic version, TSPi, was developed after TSP. The principal investigator and the development team are all from industry, and each had from 10 to 20 years of industry experience before joining the SEI.
Organizations that use the TSP include Microsoft, Intuit, The Boeing Company, Allied Signal, Lockheed Martin, NAVAIR, and SAIC.
A10. Don’t you have to have a mature organization to use TSP?
No, both low and high maturity organizations have been successful with PSP/TSP. Introducing change in low maturity organizations is always risky, but there is no alternative. Unless they change they won’t improve. Some low maturity organizations have succeeded with PSP/TSP when nothing else worked.
A11. Don’t you have to have a large organization, team, or project to benefit from TSP?
No. The TSP scales well, by design, from very small to very large organizations. Organizations with as few as 30 developers have benefited from TSP. Teams with as few as two developers have benefited from TSP. Projects as short as 6 weeks have benefited from TSP. TSP has also been used on large projects, multiple team projects, geographically distributed projects, projects involving more than one organization, and projects with a few hundred developers.
A12. Does TSP support risk management?
TSP teams practice continuous risk management. Risk identification, analysis, mitigation planning, and weekly tracking are built in. Also, TSP virtually eliminates the two top risks to every software project: being over cost and being over schedule.
A13. How will TSP help us execute our other improvement priorities?
One of the most significant barriers to improvement or to achieving high organizational maturity is experience. Too few people have had the opportunity to either work in a high maturity setting, or to implement successful change. TSP has helped several organizations gain the experience they need, both the understanding of what a high maturity process is like, and the experience of implementing successful change. This kind of experience generally breeds more success.
A14. Can the PSP and TSP work with iterative development processes and prototyping? I have seen several references to “waterfall,” but when I look at the model, it seems that it could be adaptable and work well with iterative development. Does it have to conform to any specific life-cycle model? Or by waterfall, are you just meaning the TSP processes are waterfall?
TSP specifically calls for the project team to use a life-cycle model appropriate to the task at hand. We have teams that have used both waterfall and iterative approaches.
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B. Answers About TSP and Other Models and Methodologies
B1. Will my organization need to adopt CMMI in order to benefit from PSP/TSP?
No. We do recommend, however, that organizations have an ongoing corporate improvement program with defined measurable goals, a means of assessing progress, and the key infrastructure components (SEPG, SQA, etc.) This will help to ensure successful broad adoption of PSP/TSP and will protect the investment in PSP/TSP through other organizational change.
Achieving the CMMI PA goals is easier with PSP/TSP, and PSP/TSP helps to ensure an effective implementation that produces measurable improvement that relates directly to business goals.
B2. Is TSP Compatible with CMMI and other CMMs?
Yes. CMMI, the People CMM, and other CMMs are models of organizational maturity, expressed as expected characteristics or attributes that are visible at different levels of maturity. They describe the “what,” not the “how.” PSP/TSP comprise operational processes with an integrated measurement framework. They are the “how.” They all have the same goal, so to the extent that one of the models and the PSP/TSP cover the same area, they are generally quite synergistic.
B3. Do you have any information about how TSP can be used with CMMs?
A report that describes how TSP relates to the Capability Maturity Model for Software is available on the SEI Web site. A report that describes how TSP relates to CMMI will be published in the fall of 2004.
B4. Is the PSP beneficial in an already mature (CMM Level 5) organization? If so, how can it best be implemented?
Both PSP and TSP can have significant positive effects on high-maturity organizations. The best references for implementing PSP and/or TSP into a CMM Level 5 organization are articles and presentations out of Hill Air Force Base and Northrup Grumman Information Technology (NGIT).
David Webb has published several articles about the Hill Air Force experiences on several releases of the Taskview project, including one coauthored with Watts Humphrey, and summary results from Hill AFB can be seen in a report by Donald McAndrews. Presentations by NGIT’s president at the 2003 CMMI Technology Conference and User’s Group and by the technical leads at the 2004 SEPG conference (see the SEI SEPG Web site to order the CD), present results from what resembled a controlled experiment having two very similar projects in a high maturity environment, with one project using PSP practices and one that did not.
In each case, because the organizations had Level 5 practices in place, the introduction of PSP and/or TSP was piloted and introduced according to the organization’s existing methods for evaluating new technologies for possible use in the organization. SEI has a standard introduction strategy for PSP and TSP that does not assume any particular maturity level, but it does implement high-maturity practices for such introductions, including role-based training, careful building of management support, running and evaluating pilot tests, and planning for broad rollout and support. See Appendix F of Winning with Software: An Executive Strategy by Watts Humphrey for more details.
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C. Answers About Making a Case for TSP
C1. What is the payback period?
Most of the cost of introducing PSP/TSP is incurred on a project by project basis, so introduction costs can be managed on a project by project basis. The most significant cost is lost opportunity due to a one-time training cost of about 12 days per developer.
Any project of at least four months duration will pay for the cost of training the team. Once a developer has written about 1500 lines of code or equivalent, he or she will recover the training cost through improved productivity and fewer test defects.
C2. What are the benefits of using the TSP?
The most significant benefit is improved productivity and/or schedule reduction resulting from early defect removal and improved planning and tracking. Early defect removal (a) reduces average time to remove a defect from hours to minutes, (b) reduces testing costs/schedules by 20% to 48%, (c) increases the non-test costs/schedules by 5% to 10%, and (d) yields net average savings of about 25%. Improved planning and tracking increases task hours per week by up to 50%. Task hour increases translate directly to productivity increases.
Beyond the benefits of productivity, team members generally enjoy their work much more when working in the TSP environment.
C3. Isn't TSP hard to implement?
The TSP introduction strategy is based on years of experience in process improvement and organizational change. The transition strategy, the role-based training and textbooks, the mentoring and support, were all designed to simplify introduction and reduce resistance to change.
C4. How will the TSP help staff do their jobs every day?
PSP/TSP changes the behavior of software developers. They plan their work, gather data, use the data for tracking and improvement, and manage the quality of the products they produce. As a consequence they are in control of their work and have a strong sense of empowerment, know where they stand and can defend their plans and status, and produce software of extremely high-quality and can take pride in what they built and how they built it. TSP may be the best antidote for “Death March Projects.”
C5. How does the TSP help managers?
TSP implements a self-directed team approach to software development. The team makes their own commitments and are accountable for them. The recommended management style is a fact-based, rational management approach that relies on coaching to guide the team and involves observation, analysis, and mentoring using data. Although it involves just as much work for the manager, the results are consistently better and more rewarding.
C6. I’m sold on TSP, but I need some data to use to convince my managers. Do you have anything that might help?
An SEI report, The Team Software Process (TSP) in Practice: A Summary of Recent Results, provides results and implementation data from projects and individuals that have adopted the TSP.
If you have access to the PSP/TSP area of the Software Engineering Information Repository (SEIR), follow the Presentations and Tutorials link to find John Stark’s presentation on Statistical Process Control on Earned Value and Watts Humphrey’s presentation on data analysis of PSP class data from over 1300 students.
Also, the National Institute of Standards & Technology (NIST) had a study done for them in 2002 by the Research Triangle Institute on the costs of inadequate software testing. The study includes estimates of the dollar savings possible if all defects were detected in the same phase in which they were introduced, based on survey data from the aerospace and financial services industries. It also includes estimates of the savings possible from what they call “feasible improvement” in the percentage of defects found in the stage introduced.
Finally, perhaps the best way to convince someone is to have them contact someone else they respect. Contact the SEI for the latest set of references.
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D. Answers About Training
D1. The application for instructor training must be received 60 days prior to instructor training but your schedule lists instructor training available 30 days after PSP I and II training. Is it possible to complete the training in three months?
Yes, so you may register for the three courses at the same time. We wave the 60-day requirement, since we already have your data from the course.
D2. Is it important that I attend launch coach training soon after my other PSP training? If my group doesn’t plan to launch until next year, and I have to train everyone in PSP first, then won’t it benefit me more if I attend launch coach training closer to the time that I will actually be applying it?
Wait to take launch coach training until you’re closer to the launch.
D3. How do I become an authorized PSP instructor?
You would need to complete the PSP for Engineers courses from the SEI or an authorized instructor and take and pass the instructor qualification exam. The first time you take the exam, it is free of charge. The exam is offered several times during the year, including on the last day of PSP Instructor training and at the SEPG national conference.
D4. What kind of support do SEI Partners offer for TSP?
Some companies hire SEI Partners to help with their PSP training needs and for launching TSP teams. Partners are organizations licensed by the SEI to provide PSP training or TSP coaching services. These companies have SEI-authorized PSP instructors and TSP launch coaches.
D5. Is the Executive Seminar a one-day or two-day class?
When we teach the Executive Seminar on site, it is a one-day class. When we teach the Executive Seminar for the public here at the SEI, it is a two-day class. The on-site version is the same material, it’s just a long day.
D6. Which courses require the attendees to bring a laptop computer?
The PSP for Engineers course requires the use of a computer during class. The two train-the-trainer classes (PSP Instructor Training and TSP Launch Coach Training) also require the students to use computers.
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E. Answers About Using TSP/PSP
E1. Is there an updated version of the SEI PSP tool (Excel spreadsheet) available?
An up-to-date version of the TSP tool is available to authorized TSP coaches on the Software Engineering Information Repository (SEIR). Log in using your user ID and password, and then select the TSP Launch Material page. Click on the Release Notes link on this page for information about the version, and then click on the TSP Tool link to download the tool.
When you upgrade your teams to this tool, team members must export their data from an older version and then import it in the new version. To export data, select the Export Data command from the TSP Tools drop-down in the upper-left corner of the old workbook. To import, open a copy of the new workbook and select the Import Data command from the TSP Tools drop-down list in the upper left corner of the new workbook.
If you don’t see the TSP Tools drop-down list in your workbook, make sure the workbook is not read only. Also, make sure the Custom1 toolbar is enabled.
E1. Some defects were found in requirements inspection. Should all defects be logged or only major defects?
All defects should be logged. The instructions for form INS and for script INS imply all defects, and the form INS has a column to indicate major or minor.
E2. Who should be included on the team?
The intent for team composition is to include everyone who works interdependently on the project. Treatment of the non-software staff really has to be called on a case-by-case basis. A dedicated group of hardware engineers, for example, is almost certainly part of the team. A single requirements, test, or support person who works on the project only part time probably is not. I would start by erring on the side of inclusion, i.e., include them until circumstances prove you wrong.
E3. Do you know of a source where I could find the average lines of code per day produced by an average programmer?
We're not aware of an average lines of code (LOC) per day produced by an average programmer because average programmers don’t keep that kind of data. We do have some numbers for PSP-trained engineers, though. In class, PSP students average about 20 LOC per hour. PSP-trained engineers on TSP teams average about 10 LOC/hour in implementation (including inspections) and about 5-7 LOC/hour for the entire life cycle. To get a per day number, we multiply that by four, since most engineers only manage to get about four hours of project work in per day.
Also, please be aware that the 20/LOC hour noted above is based on all languages and environments. Some languages and environments have more LOC/hour.
E4. Once agreement to pursue PSP and TSP is obtained, what is a typical time line for launching the first pilot TSP team?
Two scenarios are detailed in an appendix of Winning with Software, one for minimum time (3-4 months), another for minimum cost (depends on size and dispersion of the enterprise).
E5. In the past year I have been unable to do a TSP launch and therefore am going to go past my one-year authorization probation period next month. What it will take to get me to a state where I will be able to do my first launch and be observed?
There are additional steps you’ll have to take in order to schedule your observation. You’ll have to review the guidebooks “Leading a Development Team" and "Coaching Development Teams.” You will also need to successfully complete an exam. Finally, you will be provided with a brief tutorial that will refamiliarize you with the TSP tool. We do this because we have found that if it’s been a long time since the candidate’s training and the candidate hasn’t had much exposure to TSP during that time, the candidate can have a hard time successfully completing the observation.
For More Information
For more information about TSP, send email to tsp@sei.cmu.edu.