A controlled experiment on the effects of PSP training: detailed description and evaluation

The Personal Software Process (PSP) is a methodology for
systematic
and continuous improvement of an individual software engineer's
software production capabilities. The proponents of the PSP
claim that
the PSP methods improve in particular the program quality and
the
capability for accurate estimation of the development time, but
do not
impair productivity.

We have performed a controlled experiment for assessing these
and
related claims. The experiment compares the performance of a
group of
students that have just previously participated in a PSP course
to
a comparable set of students from a ``normal'' programming
course.
This report presents in detail the experiment design and setup,
the
results of the experiment, and our interpretation of the
results.

The results indicate that the claims are basically correct, but
the
improvements may be a lot smaller than expected.
However, we found an important additional benefit from PSP that
is not
usually mentioned by the PSP proponents: The performance in the
PSP
group was consistently less variable for most of the many
variables we
investigated. Less variable performance in a software team
... mehr
greatly
reduces the risk in software projects.