A. Winsor Brown, Assistant Director

USC Center for Software Engineering

Watts Humphrey's acclaimed book, A Discipline for Software Engineering, provides the basis for the Personal Software Process (PSP) courses that have been taught at a number of universities and companies during the past several years. According to Humphrey "...applying the concepts and practices of the course, you will 'make better plans, produce higher quality products, and have higher productivity.' These improvements are based on your own design and coding processes and data, not on adopting new ones." PSP is a process for individuals and small programming groups to increase their discipline and productivity in software development.

Personal Software Process is defined and taught in two parts that are divided into four phases. The first part is being covered in an intensive three week, three half-days per week (MWF) sub-course called Personal Software Engineering Project Management Process (PPMP), with all the exercises are done in class using spreadsheets, coupled with some data gathering on software development that you are doing at work. After a week's break, the second part, called PSP-B, will progress at a more leisurely pace: twice a week (usually MW) for seven weeks, during which some exercises will be done in class, others will be started in class and completed in the work-place with process data gathered on place programming task .

The course philosophy remain unchanged from a classic graduate course offering of PSP. It still consists of gradually introducing new process approach methods; practicing them on small programs; and letting you see for yourself how these methods help you. The difference is that the course work is compressed into nine four-hour a day sessions for the first part and fourteen four hour a day sessions for the second part. All the exercises are done under an instructor's guidance using either interactive TV during class time or other communication media when out of class. There is very little homework, and what "homework" there is will be done on work-related code.

NOTE: Part One (PPMP) can stand alone; see a separate PPMP flyer for details. Part Two (PSP-B) completes the course for professional software developers.

Among the improvements noticed by students who have participated in similar courses have been the ability to dramatically decrease the amount of time spent in coding and test, increased yield, and a LOC/hour that is almost doubled.

Number of Lectures: 9 & 14 per part, respectively:

1. Recent professional software development experience.

2. Development environment access, either brought to the ITV classroom (e.g. laptop) or within the immediate neighborhood of the classroom.

1) Course Fee: $2,000 for part one; $3,000 for part two;
or $4500 for when enrolled in both.

2) Set of photocopied notes (incl. in course fee)

3) Text, A Discipline for Software Engineering, W. Humphrey, Addison-Wesley
(incl. in course fee)

INTERACTIVE INSTRUCTIONAL TELEVISION NETWORK