Experiences from teaching PSP for freshmen

The Personal Software Process (PSP) is launched as a means for improving software development capabilities for the individual engineer. It is proposed that it should be used in software engineering curricula; some authors propose it to be used already during the first student year. The PSP course is successfully given for graduate students at Lund University since 1996. During the spring semester of 1999, it was given to undergraduate students at the software engineering program in their first year of university studies, directly after their first programming course. This paper reports results and experiences from the course given to these freshmen students. A quantitative analysis is conducted to compare the freshmen student data to data from graduate student courses, and a qualitative evaluation is conducted concerning the differences between the courses. It can be concluded that mostly the same improvement trends can be identified with freshmen students as with graduate students. However, the qualitative analysis shows that the freshmen students are more concerned with programming than with the software process issues. Based on the results, it is decided to move the PSP course to the second year in order to enable the programming skills to be better established before the PSP is launched