Beyond the Personal Software Process: Metrics collection and analysis for the differently disciplined

Abstract

Pedagogies such as the Personal Software Process (PSP) shift metrics definition, collection, and analysis from the organizational level to the individual level. While case study research indicates that the PSP can provide software engineering students with empirical support for improving estimation and quality assurance, there is little evidence that many students continue to use the PSP when no longer required to do so. Our research suggests that this "PSP adoption problem" may be due to two problems: the high overhead of PSP-style metrics collection and analysis, and the requirement that PSP users "context switch" between product development and process recording. This paper overviews our initial PSP experiences, our first attempt to solve the PSP adoption problem with the LEAP system, and our current approach called Hackystat. This approach fully automates both data collection and analysis, which eliminates overhead and context switching. However, Hackystat changes the kind of metrics data that is collected, and introduces new privacy-related adoption issues of its own.

DuoTracker: Tool Support for Software Defect Data Collection and Analysis

“…The reason mostly cited for not using PSP is similar to those cited in [13]. The common reasons for not adopting PSP are the time log and defect log associated with PSP.…”

Object-focused environments revisited

“…There are other tools that record usage data, such as HackyStat [72]. It collects navigation data, metrics data, and test runs.…”

Jasmine: A PSP Supporting Tool

“…To reduce the high overhead and context-switching in manual data collection, tools like Hackystat [2,9], PROM [12] have been developed. They collect automatically the PSP data and provide various analyses on the collected data.…”

“…Several PSP support tools have been developed such as Process Dashboard [11], Hackystat [2,9], and PSPA [10] to help automatic data collection and analyses. Among those tools, Hackystat provides the most similar functionalities to the Jasmine in that both tools provide sensor-based automated data collection.…”

“…Sets of historical project data are used to make a reliable estimate on effort and quality. However, due to the high-overhead and context-switching problem of manual data recording, developers have difficulties to acquire reliable data, which can lead to wrong analysis results [2,3]. The problem can be overcome through an automated tool for collecting the PSP data and analyzing the collected data.…”