Implementing Concepts from the Personal Software Process in an Industrial Setting

The Personal Software Process (PSP) has been taught at a number of universities with impressive results. It is also of interest to industry as a means for training their software engineers. While there are published reports on the teaching of PSP in classroom settings (at universities and industry), little systematic study has been conducted on the implementation of PSP in industry. Also, largely anecdotal evidence exists as to its effectiveness with real programming tasks. Effectiveness is measured in terms of the number of trained engineers who actually use PSP in their daily work, and improvements in productivity and defect removal. In this paper we report on a study of the implementation of some PSP concepts in a commercial organization. The empirical enquiry method that we employed was action research. Our results identify the problems that were encountered during the four major activities of an implementation of PSP: planning, training, evaluation, and leveraging. We describe how these problems were addressed, and the general lessons learned from the implementation. An overall transfer of PSP training rate of 46.5 % was achieved. For the engineers in our study, those who applied all of the taught PSP concepts on-the-job improved their defect detection capabilities.