Do you follow the Personal Software Process? Does your organization/team follow the Team Software Process? [closed]

Answer 1

I have completed the PSP course, the next one is supposed to be TSP which is meant for team dynamics as others say. I have mixed feelings about PSP (mostly negative, but the results were interesting), I arrived to the following conclusions:

• First of all my main source of frustration is that the design templates are way too tedious and impractical. Change them for UML and BPMN, tell your instructors from the start, IMPOSE IF NECESSARY. The book itself says that the design templates are for people who don't know or want to learn UML.
• Secondly, estimations were the only valuable part for me. The book itself says that you can use other stuff appart from lines of code and it even tells you how to know how relevant they are statistically. My take on this (counting lines of code) is that a tool/plugin that connects with your VCS (git, mercurial) must exist and automate the building of your personal database, otherwise is too tedious to track base/added/reused parts.
• The process itself is nice, but not applicable to big projects, why?, because it just doesn't cope with iterations. In the real world, due to requirement changes you will always have to reiterate on a project. You can still apply the discipline to small programmatic tasks, this is: plan, design, review your design (have design standards and a small checklist that u can memorize), code, review your code (have clear coding standards and a small mental checklist you can memorize), test, ponder on your mistakes. Any experienced programmer will know these are eventually intuitive steps to follow. My recommendation in real practice: follow the process but don't document other stuff than your design, and if you do implement unit tests, document them well.
• This process might actually be worth to follow and practical... for real-time system programming where there is absolutely no room for mistakes, otherwise doesn't feel worth it.
• If you are seeking for a methodology to organize and improve focus, try GTD (Get Things Done) and Pomodoro first.
• If you have obsessive-compulsive disorder you might actually enjoy PSP =).

My final recommendation, learn from it as a reference, might lead to better and more practical stuff. This thing is just too academic.

P.S.: R.I.P. Watts Humphrey

Answer 2

I followed the PSP for a few weeks some years ago, because my group wanted to experiment with it. I found it very disappointing and even irritating to work with. It exhausted my patience. My main negative points are:

• Ridiculous emphasys in things like typos or missing semicolons.
• Impractical forms that you have to fill by hand.
• Focus on procedural programming instead of OO.
• Estimating involves counting the number of loops, functions, etc.

I found it a massive waste of time. I'd rather choose to leave this profession than to be forced to follow the PSP.

Related material: My answer about a PSP book in the "What programming book would you NOT recommend to developers" question.

Answer 3

I have used the PSP and TSP process by heart for 4 years (though it was in the begining of my software career). As an idealist you will love what is being done by you and ofcourse Yes there are amazing results as well.
Though PSP advocates the recording of your defects to the core (such as ; or typo's), I was in a conversation with Mr. Watts Humphrey where lot of people asked him about the advancements of compilers and missing of object orientedness (which I felt, how is it missing, as I was an OO Programmer and was using it successfully). There was a very good answer provided by him. It went on like, "PSP, or as a matter of fact any process methodology, is not a concept thats stuck on a single idea. The core idea is to introduce people to the quality methods and analysis.
"Its always adaptive. You can tailor it to fit to your needs. If you feel like you will go with Function Point methodology, you are alright to go ahead with it. Same for any estimation techniques. But you should do it constantly and repetetively.
"Same with the advancement of compilers. If you feel like the WBS in the structure of PSP won't fit to your development, do modify it and use but again do it constinuously.
"As you do it continuously, you will have collected the historical data of yours and will be statistically do a predectable and accurate estimates on all the parameters"
May be I am giving this answer late but when I read all the replies, I felt I wanted to share this. As per the tools, we have Process Dashboard, the PSP excel sheet and all.

Answer 4

I got into this once, even tried using PSP Dashboard.

It's just too hard to keep up with. Who wants to use a stop watch for all their activities? Follow Joel's advice on Painless Scheduling and Evidence Based Scheduling.

+1 this question, -1 to PSP.