
The Personal Software Process (2000) [pdf] - Tomte
http://www.sei.cmu.edu/reports/00tr022.pdf
======
nwjsmith
I'm interested to know if anyone here has used this over an extended period of
time. Does it work for you? Have you become better at estimating? Have you
lowered your defect rate? Have you increased your pace?

I'm skeptical that something this prescriptive could be effective, but it'd be
great if there was evidence (anecdotal or a study) that shows this is
effective.

~~~
ci5er
I went through a personal anti six-sigma period in the early 90s. And adopted
a slimmed down version of this for myself. Rather: it had the same name and
came from CMU, but I don't recall it being quite so cumbersome looking, and I
adopted a slimmed down "personal-only" version of it for myself. I didn't work
that hard at it, and I was able to bring alternative data to a larger meta-
drama I was somehow participating in.

Later - I spun out of there and started a company and we did that slimmed down
version, based on the this Y2K document's predecessor. It didn't seem to
cumbersome because it was inline with a lot of things we were already doing.
And we had were using this light-weight measurement practice embedded in a
modified dev-team wide process based on the spiral (we were all from
waterfall-world, and this fit us well).

I've gotta say: it worked very very well. Especially after a few iterations
through a few spirals. Skeptics came around pretty quickly. (Well, except one
guy - but he hated everything)

I can't imagine doing 100% of what's written in this document, as a dedicated,
in parallel, side-car type activity - but it might still be well worth it.

------
throwaway_java
A senior recommended this to me when I was a junior. My attitude at the time
was that things would take as long as they would take and I wasn't sure how
long that would be because I had never done it before. Obviously as a junior
you tend not to be very fast or very good at getting things done.

His recommendation was that this was a good way to get better at estimating so
that you could manage other people's (your manager, the sales people)
expectations better.

This seemed like good advice.

In practice, I'm terrible at logging time and recording details of what I have
worked on and tend to rely on version control as a work log (hey, I aim to
have multiple commits per day and record reasonably good commit messages which
link to defect tickets etc)

So for what it's worth, I don't use PSP, but am kind of interested in it. My
estimations, defect rates, and speed have increased over time anyway because
experience.

