Modified Personal Software Process (mPSP): An Experiment in Teaching Software Engineering

DOI: 10.5176/2251-2195_CSEIT17.25

Authors: Arturo I Concepcion, Bir Sodhi

Abstract: The Software Engineering Institute (SEI) Carnegie Mellon University developed the Personal Software Process (PSP) as a training strategy to improve the discipline of software engineers but its greatest drawback is writing numerous reports for every weekly programming assignment. This drawback accounts for a huge time overhead spent on the postmortem part of the training. In the School of Computer Science & Engineering, CSUSB, we have experimented on a Modified PSP (mPSP) that has only six major forms and uses UML diagrams in the software design and analysis part of the training. The mPSP was incrementally developed from four consecutive classes of software engineering: Winter 2014, Winter 2015, Spring 2015, and Winter 2016. The latest version of mPSP resulted in more acceptance by the students and improving the student’s software engineering skills

Keywords: Personal Software Process (PSP); software engineering; project-based learning.