Athletes know their
performances quantitatively in seconds, minutes, feet, meters and so on,
sports persons know their statistics, musicians know their pitch,
surgeons are known by their success rate but software engineers only
talk about the number of years of their experience. The fundamental
difference is that all other performing professionals keep data about
themselves and use the data for identifying opportunities for their own
improvement.
The
Personal Software Process
is a measurement framework that helps individual engineers to measure
various aspects of their own performance and helps identify
opportunities for improvement. The Personal Software Process is really
for those who are in pursuit of professional excellence. It was
developed by Watts Humphrey after he had built the CMM process model for
the Software Engineering Institute. He actually wrote 75 programs
himself imagining he is CMM Level 5 company employee and put together
all the best practices that would bring down his defects, and keep his
effort and schedule variance within 10% of that committed.
Engineers attending
the PSP workshop have found astounding results within 10 days. In each
of the 10 days they write a program and follow the process of recording
data about their own activities and analyzing the data to see how they
can improve. They can visibly see quantitative improvement each day as
they are introduced to best practices to follow.
Over 10 days they
learn estimation and planning skills, Quality management skills through
design representation, design review, design verification techniques,
code reviews, checklist preparation and interpreting software quality
profiles. The results.
After the PSP course
the engineers are really well equipped to work on projects that are
launched using the Team Software Process. The Team Software Process
helps build a self directed team that is fully equipped as a team to
undertake the project and estimate and plan each and every task that is
to be done in the project.
The TSP results are
really astounding.
