A Replicated Empirical Study of the Impact of the Methodsin the PSP on Individual Engineers

Abstract

The Personal Software Process (PSP) has during the last couple of years gained attention as a way to individual improvements in software development. The PSP is introduced to students and engineers through a course, which introduces a personal software development process. The personal software development process is improved in steps during the course and a collection of methods is introduced to support the personal development process. The question is, however, how do these methods influence the performance of an individual engineer? This question has been studied in a study made at the Software Engineering Institute, and the study has shown that the methods in the PSP have a positive effect on the performance of the individuals. There is however a need to replicate this study to confirm the findings in other settings and with other individuals. This paper describes a replication of the study made at the Software Engineering Institute. Both the original study and this replication are made on data reported from the students taking the PSP course. The differences between the two studies are the programming languages used, which held the courses, the class sizes, and the experiences of the students. In summary, the results from this replication confirm the results in the original study: Size estimation accuracy gets better, the defect density gets lower, the defects are found earlier and that the pre-compile yield gets better during the PSP course. Basically, the two studies show that the methods in the PSP help engineers to improve their performance.