| PSP(sm): A Self-Improvement Process for Software Engineers |  | Author: Watts S. Humphrey
Publisher: Addison-Wesley Professional
List Price: $64.99
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Rating:  6 reviews
Media: Hardcover
Pages: 368
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.7
Dimensions (in): 9.2 x 6.4 x 1.2
ISBN: 0321305493
Dewey Decimal Number: 005.1
EAN: 9780321305497
Publication Date: March 13, 2005
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Showing reviews 1-5 of 6
 A crackpot who made it big. May 21, 2009
Alan F. Grimes (Virginia, USA)
3 out of 8 found this review helpful
Watts Humphery is a crackpot. There are some perfectly splendid, even renown authors in software engineering such as Brooks and Sommerville. Those books are practical guides to the management of software projects and even the solution of large and complex software problems. Watts Humphery, on the other hand seems to have arrived at this demented philosophy that the solution to every software problem is careful time logging! He even describes how he logs and categorizes his time as an author as if it were somehow instrumental to his writing process. He believes that any technical problem can be solved by nothing more than measuring the process by which it is solved. Some of the things he lists as goals, such as "zero errors on the first compile" take no account of the problems of incompletely documented systems and experimental coding, which is often unavoidable, especially for younger programmers. If your professor lists this as the course text, drop the course and start looking for a better university!
 Very good February 14, 2009
Juan Jose Cardenas (Lima, Peru.)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
If you use this book practices, in your every day work, with discipline and consistency, your performance as professional software developer will improve and your data will show it objectively. In my opinion this is a very good book and an excellent job from Mr. Humphrey.
Excelent book April 10, 2007
S. V. Moreno (Toluca, México)
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
This book is a great tool to learn how to improve our development process. I'm very happy with my buy.
 Study a good self improvement software engineering method August 27, 2005
Manca Massimo (Pordenone, PN Italy)
5 out of 11 found this review helpful
The book is good, every argument weel written with simple language and lesson tailored. PSP is a good set of processes to use in software development. If you wish to self study PSP it is good but you have to download a lot of material from the SEI website (exercises, workbooks and so on). Humprey write about process extensions but not so much as needed in practice. Also a more detailed description about PSP processes isn't present on the book so you haveto read about on SEI website material.
 Applies well in some but not all situations... May 8, 2005
Thomas Duff (Portland, OR United States)
20 out of 25 found this review helpful
As an IT professional and software developer, I'm all for standards and processes. PSP - A Self-Improvement Process for Software Engineers by Watts S. Humphrey (Addison-Wesley) outlines a personal methodology for improving your development efforts. But it's definitely not applicable to all environments...
Chapter List: The Personal Process Strategy; The Baseline Personal Process; Measuring Software Size; Planning; Software Estimating; The PROBE Estimating Method; Software Planning; Software Quality; Design and Code Reviews; Software Design; The PSP Design Templates; Design Verification; Process Extensions; Using The Personal Software Process; Index
From an overall perspective, I think the concepts in here are good and the book is well-written. Watts has devised a methodology that a developer can apply on their own to improve their coding, estimating, and defect resolution skills. This is done by extensive measurement and recording of statistic and time taken to accomplish certain tasks. These numbers are transferred to forms that can then be statistically analyzed to see the trends and make corrections in your techniques based on personal problem areas. The advantage that this methodology offers is that you don't have to get buy-in from an entire department in order to implement it. Conversely, PSP can be extended to apply to a team development environment in order to improve everyone's ability to work and develop code as a group.
Where I start to have issues is that it doesn't translate well to all environments. It's best applied to situations where you're developing programs with actual lines of code (like Java or C++) that allow you to do things like count lines of code, program sizes, or function points. It doesn't address rapid application development (RAD) environments like Lotus Notes/Domino very well, as "lines of code" is often next to nothing. Graphical design techniques that code underlying "plumbing" will make your numbers seem very small. Counting and tracking defects could be useful, but once again you'll often have to ignore stats related to defects per program size. You'll also need to be pretty comfortable with statistics to work with this methodology, as Watts gets into some pretty large formulas to generate the "score" of some of the tracking measures.
This is one of those books where if I were coding 15000 line Java programs, I might be really excited. Developing in a RAD environment makes me see a lot of this as unnecessary tracking for tracking's sake. But if you're a "true software engineer" in the most traditional sense, you'll probably find things in here that you'll want to try out.
Showing reviews 1-5 of 6
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