Process feedback and learning

The personal software process (PSP) has been developed by the Software Engineering Institute (SEI) to address the need for process improvement in small organizations and projects. Its principal focus is to help individual software engineers and small software teams to improve their performance. The PSP provides engineers with a defined sequence of improvement actions and explicit feedback on their performance at each step. This helps them to improve the quality of their work and to understand the effectiveness of the methods they use. A PSP course has been developed to show students how to define, measure, analyze, and improve their personal software development practices. This graduate or senior level undergraduate course is currently being taught at six universities. The PSP is also being tested at four industrial software organizations. Early results indicate that the method effectively motivates engineers to use a disciplined personal process and to strive for personal process improvement