The Personal Software Process, Experiences from Denmark
This addresses software quality and efficiency issues for software engineers and the industry, but it is incremental as it applies an existing method to new data from Denmark.
The paper tackles software process improvement by applying the Personal Software Process (PSP) method to enhance individual software engineers' capabilities, reporting that it improved effort estimation skills and reduced total defect density by nearly one-third with a 10% effort in defect prevention, cutting testing time by 50%.
Software process improvement (SPI) research and practice is transforming from the traditional large-scale assessment based improvement initiatives into smaller sized, tailored initiatives where the emphasis is set on the development personnel and their personal abilities. The personal software process (PSPSM) is a method for improving the personal capabilities of a single software engineer. This paper contributes to the body of knowledge within this area by reporting experiences from Denmark. The results indicate an improvement in the effort estimation skills and a significant increase in the resulting product quality in terms of reduced total defect density. The data shows that with relatively small effort (i.e., 10%) used in defect prevention activities (i.e., design and code reviews) almost one third of all defects were removed and consequently the time required for the testing was cut by 50%. Based on this data the use of the PSP method in the software industry is discussed.