Software Construction

PSP: The Personal Software Process

One of the new subjects you will encounter in COMP2100 is the Personal Software Process. Although you will only have to spend a small amount of time studying it, you will spend a lot of your time following it. The PSP is an organised, disciplined way of going about your work. Although in this unit your contact with the PSP will be limited, there is much more to learn in later-year units.

Background

The PSP is part of the great drive towards professionalism in software engineering. Following the techniques of the PSP will lead you away from random hacking and towards responsible, repeatable, informed, rational, sane software engineering. Experience in universities in the US and in the software industry suggests that the PSP can lead to a dramatic improvement in your performance as a programmer, both in terms of productivity and quality.

The PSP is the result of applying to the individual programmer some of the ideas of the Capability Maturity Model, an initiative of the Software Engineering Institute at Carnegie-Mellon University. The CMM provides a way of evaluating the process followed by a software engineering company.

You can find out more about the PSP and the CMM from the web site of the Software Engineering Institute at Carnegie-Mellon University.

Our PSP work will be based on a part of the books Introduction to the Personal Software Process and A Discipline for Software Engineering by Watts S. Humphrey.

Support

Part of your PSP work will involve filling in various forms as you work. Here are links to PDF versions of all the forms you will need.

• Time Recording Log

• Weekly Time Use Summary

• Defect Recording Log

• Initial Project Plan Summary

• Final Project Plan Summary

Here are the instructions on how to use the forms.

• Time Recording Log Instructions

• Weekly Time Use Summary Instructions

• • Defect Recording Log Instructions
  • PSP defect types recommended updates for Java [cwj]

• Initial Project Plan Summary Instructions

• Final Project Plan Summary Instructions

Finally, here are two process scripts you will need.

• PSP Process Script

• Code Review Script