The Personal Software Process in practice:: Experience in two cases over five years

The Personal Software Process (PSP) started in 1995 and promised to improve individual software engineering practice. PSP addresses in particular the software quality in terms of defect densities and the process quality in terms of defect prevention (yield) and predictability of development time and size of the software products. This experience report of two software developers applying the PSP over five years first in an academic setting and later over three years in industrial software development shows that (1) PSP is an appropriate method to understand your software development process and its capabilities, (2) PSP makes it easy to identify areas of improvements in the process, and (3) PSP allows to do impressively accurate time, size, and defect estimates. The main drawback of PSP is its restricted applicapability in todays software development community. The challenging task to use PSP in your daily work requires a huge amount of discipline.