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This is the first in a series of SEI reports to provide periodic updates on the state of software engineering practice in the DoD software community. The SEI has developed, and is refining, a process framework and assessment methodology for characterizing the processes used by software organizations to develop and evolve software products. This report provides a brief overview of the process framework and assessment ap- proach, describes assessment results obtained to date, and dis- cusses implications of the current state of the practice for both customers and suppliers of DoD software.

This paper discusses the results of the author’s research and observations on the issues of designing software process definitions so they are both effective and easy to use. The reason for defining a software process is to improve software development capability [Kellner 19883. Process design starts with the specification of the process objectives and the development of an overall framework. Appropriate tools and methods are then incorporated and the resulting definition is carefully fitted to the users’ needs. This last step is generally accomplished through an iterative cycle of process refinement and test until the process stabilizes and the users’ needs are reasonably satisfied.

Summary form only given. The Personal Software Process (PSP)/sup TM/ promises to be a powerful tool for software educators. The author describes the PSP and some results achieved by using it. The author also discusses the principles behind the PSP and the reasons why it is effective as a teaching instrument. The author suggests some implications of the PSP for software education. The principal PSP objective is to demonstrate the benefits of using a defined process, planning and tracking development work, measuring engineering performance, and managing work quality. The PSP is introduced with a family of processes and a set of exercises. By following the processes to do the ten exercises, engineers learn the methods and they see from their own data how the methods work for them.

The personal software process (PSP) has been developed by the Software Engineering Institute (SEI) to address the need for process improvement in small organizations and projects. Its principal focus is to help individual software engineers and small software teams to improve their performance. The PSP provides engineers with a defined sequence of improvement actions and explicit feedback on their performance at each step. This helps them to improve the quality of their work and to understand the effectiveness of the methods they use. A PSP course has been developed to show students how to define, measure, analyze, and improve their personal software development practices. This graduate or senior level undergraduate course is currently being taught at six universities. The PSP is also being tested at four industrial software organizations. Early results indicate that the method effectively motivates engineers to use a disciplined personal process and to strive for personal process improvement.