A Controlled Experiment for Validating the Personal Software Process Methodology

The Personal Software Process is a process improvement methodology aiming at individual software engineers. It claims to improve software quality (in particular defect content), effort estimation capability, and process adaptation and improvement capabilities. We have tested some of these claims in a controlled experiment comparing the performance of participants who had just previously received a PSP course to a control group of participants who had received other technical training instead. Each participant of both groups performed the same task. The results indicate that the PSP group estimated their productivity more accurately, produced more reliable programs, and showed smaller variability in performance than the control group. We conclude that PSP training reduces the risk in a software development effort, although the improvements are smaller than some PSP proponents claim. Keywords: process improvement, quality management, effort estimation, productivity, risk 1 The Personal ..