Author: Watts S. Humphrey
Published: 1995
Publisher: Pearson Education, Inc.
The author Watts Humphrey needs no introduction to the software engineering community. He was a real “process innovator” whose pioneering work led to the development of the widely known and implemented Capability Maturity Model (CMM/ CMMI). While this model helped in instilling some discipline to the chaotic way of developing software which existed in the organizations, Watts Humphrey believed in catching the software engineers young in their schools itself and teach them a disciplined way of developing software.
Thus Personal Software Process (PSP) was born and this book is a complete guide to this process.
PSP is taught in this book through a series of 10 programming exercises, requiring progressively higher levels of process discipline. All the required forms, templates,checklists, process scripts for this purpose are made available in the appendices (which forms almost 40 % of the book’s bulk !).
This book is almost a text book and definitely not for light reading. At the same time it is not too difficult to grasp for any software engineer.
In my view this book should form a mandatory part of any software engineering curriculum.
A must read for all software engineers and proponents of Agile too (since I could sense the principles of agile development throughout the process) !
However it needs to be revisited and overhauled to fit the current scenario of software development (this book was written 1995 !).
