The Hindu : Business : Personal and Team software processes catching up

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Wednesday, Mar 23, 2005

Business

Business

Personal and Team software processes catching up

By P. Vikram Reddy

HYDERABAD, MARCH 22. After CMM and Sigma six, it is now the turn of Personal Software Process (PSP) and Team Software Process (TSP) to catch the attention of the IT industry.

Globally around 100 companies and 4,000 developers having adopted this relatively new practice, while in India it is now being talked about by ten companies and 500 engineers having been trained in the practice.

Watts Humphrey, fellow of Software Engineering Institute (SEI), Carnegie Mellon University, is the inventor of PSP, and TSP. Both are service marks of SEI. Recently, he was awarded the National Medal of Technology, the highest honour awarded by the President of the U.S. to leading innovators.

Mr. Humphrey was also involved in developing the CMM (capability maturity model). He is now visiting several Indian cities to popularise these concepts among IT professionals. Speaking to The Hindu here, he said "I am hopeful PSP/TSP would come onto the mainstream quickly."

The SEI PSP enables software engineers to plan their work based on personal data, to measure their work and use the results to improve and feel personally responsible for the quality of software they create. The SEI TSP enables managers to build and maintain self-directed teams whose members understand business and product goals and develop their own plans to achieve them, he said.

And the benefits? Mr. Humphrey says, for the company it leads to a predictable schedule, lower costs and higher productivity. Average productivity, he says, has gone up by as much as 68 per cent and quality improvement several fold. The disadvantage, if any, is that the company has to invest money upfront, he says emphasising that companies have to realise that it is an investment that has to be made, and it will pay off in a year or two.

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