PSP: A Self-Improvement Process for Software Engineers
December 6th, 2009
Product DescriptionMost software-development groups have embarrassing records: By some accounts, more than half of all software projects are significantly late and over budget, and nearly a quarter of them are cancelled without ever being completed. Although developers recognize that unrealistic schedules, inadequate resources, and unstable requirements are often to blame for such failures, few know how to solve these problems. Fortunately, the Personal Software Process (PSP) provides a clear and proven solution. Comprising precise methods developed over many years by Watts S. Humphrey and the Software Engineering Institute (SEI), the PSP has successfully transformed work practices in a wide range of organizations and has already. . . More >>
PSP: A Self-Improvement Process for Software Engineers
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5 Responses to “PSP: A Self-Improvement Process for Software Engineers”
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The book is good, every argument weel written with simple language and lesson tailored. PSP is a good set of processes to use in software development. If you wish to self study PSP it is good but you have to download a lot of material from the SEI website (exercises, workbooks and so on). Humprey write about process extensions but not so much as needed in practice. Also a more detailed description about PSP processes isn’t present on the book so you haveto read about on SEI website material.
Rating: 3 / 5
Watts Humphery is a crackpot. There are some perfectly splendid, even renown authors in software engineering such as Brooks and Sommerville. Those books are practical guides to the management of software projects and even the solution of large and complex software problems. Watts Humphery, on the other hand seems to have arrived at this demented philosophy that the solution to every software problem is careful time logging! He even describes how he logs and categorizes his time as an author as if it were somehow instrumental to his writing process. He believes that any technical problem can be solved by nothing more than measuring the process by which it is solved. Some of the things he lists as goals, such as “zero errors on the first compile” take no account of the problems of incompletely documented systems and experimental coding, which is often unavoidable, especially for younger programmers. If your professor lists this as the course text, drop the course and start looking for a better university!
Rating: 1 / 5
If you use this book practices, in your every day work, with discipline and consistency, your performance as professional software developer will improve and your data will show it objectively. In my opinion this is a very good book and an excellent job from Mr. Humphrey.
Rating: 5 / 5
This book is a great tool to learn how to improve our development process. I’m very happy with my buy.
Rating: 5 / 5
The intent is to reduce the defect rate in software. With an emphasis on doing this when we have several million lines of source code. All the more so if the application might involve safety issues or be critical to its company’s bottom line.
Humphrey points out that the writing of such large code might typically follow practices used for code bodies orders of magnitude smaller. But that this leads to far too many defects. He explains that PSP offers a discipline for the individual programmer to follow. And how this can be scaled to a team of programmers.
PSP stresses investing in design time and review time, relative to the actual coding time. It’s big on writing down the times spent on these stages, so that you have actual quantities to see and from which to get metrics. You cannot improve what you cannot measure. The review time is considered a good investment, for finding bugs here is inherently more productive than relying on a downstream testing stage or user feedback.
Perhaps the most contentious aspect is whether to do a review of your code before compiling it?! Many will not. After all, the compiler can swiftly find the syntax errors. Why waste time looking for these beforehand? Isn’t this a retrograde step? The book’s rejoinder is that syntax errors might be considered to be distributed like more serious logic errors. Hence, if you review before compiling, and find 80% of the syntax errors that the compiler finds, then perhaps you only also found 80% of the logic errors. Opps?
A simple and ingenious self diagnostic tool. But despite the logic of this, water will flow uphill before any significant portion of programmers adopts this method. Pressing ‘make’ or its equivalent to do a compilation is simply too easy. The book is on far more plausible ground describing the other aspects of PSP.
Rating: 4 / 5