Personal Software Process

Personal Software Process
The Personal Software Process (PSP) applies the capability maturity levels to individual programmers. The goal is to educate the individual about their programming strengths and weaknesses so that they can become better programmers more skilled at performing their job.

"PSP a takes the practitioners through a set of evolutionary stages called the Baseline Process (PSP0), the Personal Planner Process (PSP1), Personal Error Management (PSP2), Personal Design Principles (PSP3), the Cycle Personal Process (PSP4), and the Team Software Process (TS)[25,36,35].

PSP0 establishes the baseline that is essentially the current software development practices followed by the software engineers.

PSP1 adds planning steps to PSP0 by adding size and resource estimation and a test report, followed by schedule planning and status tracking.

PSP2 adds personal design and code reviews to PSP1. These reviews help the software engineers to find defects earlier in their processes. They analyze the defects and establish review checklists that have been tailored to their personal defect experience. PSP2 also addresses proper design process and the end product of the design process.

PSP3 introduces methods for individuals to develop larger-scale programs.

PSP4 and TSP introduces the concepts to couple individual PSPs into larger team activities but it does not define team processes or team exercises[35]. The next section presents how PSP could be introduced in the university curricula and industrial practice."

Additional Reading
http://www.sei.cmu.edu/activities/cmm/high-maturity/spc-psp-icsq.pdf

Advantages
Better Planning and estimates through improved estimation skills.
Reduced number of bugs in the software through learned bug reduction techniques.
Better repeatability through documented experiences and long term data collection.

Disadvantages
Education process can be time intensive.
Data collection Process can be seen as "Big Brother"

Recommendations
Educate programmers on PSP.

Taken from web site http://www.cs.usask.ca/grads/vsk719/academic/856/project/node6.html