Software Process: Applying Industrial Strength Methods In Engineering Education

Abstract

Improving productivity and quality in software development is one of the major concerns of the software engineering discipline, as software systems grow to millions, and soon billions, of lines of code. Productivity and defect density levels that are considered very good today will be inadequate to keep up with this future growth. As a result, software development professionals and organizations are striving to improve existing processes and to develop new ones. One example of demonstrated benefits from these efforts is the success of the Personal Software Process (PSP) and the Team Software Process (TSP) developed by the Software Engineering Institute (SEI) at Carnegie Mellon University. This paper discusses the structure of the TSP and PSP processes, industry experiences with their application, and their relationship to other process improvement frameworks, including the current version of the SEI’s Capability Maturity Model (now known as CMMI). With this background, it reflects on the introduction of the PSP and TSP into software engineering curricula, and reports experiences at the Milwaukee School of Engineering, one of the first four ABET-accredited software engineering programs.