Applying the PSP in industry

The Personal Software Process is designed for engineers working in isolated settings. The author describes a case study where he introduced the PSP in an industrial environment and that effort raised the issues of: training form and duration, resistance to change, independence and dependence between the single programmer and his or her team, overhead in data collection and tool support, and sustainability of measure. We addressed these problems by considerably modifying the PSP for that environment. One year after its introduction, only part of the PSP is still in use. The PSP proved to be more useful as a model to inspire a process improvement effort than as an off-the-shelf process to be reused without modification. Although the modifications cannot be generalized, the experience gained can