Critical Review of the Personal Software Process
Mihika Shah, Arizona State University
Quality management is a very important part of software organizations, and it is imperative to produce good quality products. In order to do that, it is necessary for every individual involved in the team to do superior quality work. The Personal Software Process provides guidelines that would provide an engineer with a disciplined approach to solve problems, and complete products which are of high quality, on schedule, and under the budget. This paper provides a summary of Watts S. Humphrey’s report on the PSP, and in the end, a brief opinion on his report.
Subject Descriptors: D.2.9 Management – Software Process Models K.6.3 …show more content…
Before this, the most common way to assess the quality of a product was to test it once it had been built, and then fix it, which turned out to be expensive both cost and time wise, and hence the focus shifted in improving the quality of the product while it was being built.
However, the software industry improved its quality management only when Michael Fagan introduced software inspections in 1976. The second major step in software quality management that was taken was the introduction of the Capability Maturity Model (CMM) in 1987, which focused on the management system and the support and assistance provided to the development engineers.
The next step in improving software quality was the Personal Software Process (PSP) by Humphrey. PSP improves the software quality by providing the engineers with a framework with which to do quality work. The concept of PSP was formed because, unless every individual member of the team could not contribute a quality piece of work, the end result of the entire product would not be of a superior quality. Thus the fundamental principle behind PSP is that an engineer must do quality work in order to produce a quality product. PSP helps the engineer by guiding them to use sound engineering principles, and gives them a set of methods, forms, and scripts that shows them how to plan, measure and manage their work. It also shows the engineer how to analyze the results of a job, so that it can lead to an improvement in product quality in the
Mihika Shah, Arizona State University
Quality management is a very important part of software organizations, and it is imperative to produce good quality products. In order to do that, it is necessary for every individual involved in the team to do superior quality work. The Personal Software Process provides guidelines that would provide an engineer with a disciplined approach to solve problems, and complete products which are of high quality, on schedule, and under the budget. This paper provides a summary of Watts S. Humphrey’s report on the PSP, and in the end, a brief opinion on his report.
Subject Descriptors: D.2.9 Management – Software Process Models K.6.3 …show more content…
Before this, the most common way to assess the quality of a product was to test it once it had been built, and then fix it, which turned out to be expensive both cost and time wise, and hence the focus shifted in improving the quality of the product while it was being built.
However, the software industry improved its quality management only when Michael Fagan introduced software inspections in 1976. The second major step in software quality management that was taken was the introduction of the Capability Maturity Model (CMM) in 1987, which focused on the management system and the support and assistance provided to the development engineers.
The next step in improving software quality was the Personal Software Process (PSP) by Humphrey. PSP improves the software quality by providing the engineers with a framework with which to do quality work. The concept of PSP was formed because, unless every individual member of the team could not contribute a quality piece of work, the end result of the entire product would not be of a superior quality. Thus the fundamental principle behind PSP is that an engineer must do quality work in order to produce a quality product. PSP helps the engineer by guiding them to use sound engineering principles, and gives them a set of methods, forms, and scripts that shows them how to plan, measure and manage their work. It also shows the engineer how to analyze the results of a job, so that it can lead to an improvement in product quality in the