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Abstract:

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 improvements are smaller than the PSP proponents usually assume. We could not find improved effort estimation capabilities and only a small improvement of program reliability. Further important observations are the low actual usage of PSP techniques in the PSP group and the group's smaller variability in performance compared to the control group. We conjecture that PSP training does not typically realize its potential benefits (as seen in some industrial PSP success stories) when programmers are left alone with motivating themselves to actually use the PSP techniques.

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