Using the personal software process to motivate good programming practices

Abstract

A reduced form of the Personal Software Process was used in two introductory programming courses to help students learn the value of a proper programming methodology. Students collected data during the development of their programming projects and that data was summarised and presented to the class as a whole. From the data, students were able to conclude on their own the value of early software development stages (planning, design and review) in reducing debugging time and in producing better quality software. INTRODUCTIONOne of the greatest challenges in helping beginning programmers to learn proper programming methodology is in convincing them that how one goes about developing software is just as important as what one produces. Due to lack of experience, beginning programmers tend towards a chaotic approach to program development which bounces among design, coding and testing in a seemingly random fashion and is often not much more than a blind search for a solution. Telling students that methodology is important and assigning reading on the topic may be informative to them but these activities do not provide them the motivation and experience necessary to appreciate the value of a formal approach to programming. A more effective approach to this lesson is to allow students to draw their own conclusions about the value of methodology based upon a quantitative analysis of their classroom experience. Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. To copy otherwise, to republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee.ITiCSE '98 Dublin, Ireland 0 1990 ACM I-581 1%000-7/90/0008.,, $5.00The Personal Software Process (PSP) [3] is related to the Capability Maturity Model (CMM) which was developed at the Software Engineering Institute of Carnegie-Mellon University. The CMM has been used successfully to improve software development processes in a variety of organisations [l] and is now required for many U.S. defence contractors. The PSP applies the philosophy of the CMM at an individual level. It includes a well-defined process for approaching all phases of programming, a set of design techniques for programmers and a basis for data collection to support continuous process improvement at an individual level. While the entire PSP is much too complex for beginning programmers to master, an appropriate PSP subset can be very effective in guiding students through the programming process and in motivating good programming practices. This paper describes an adaptation of the PSP to introductory programming courses and how it was used to motivate learning. Section 3 discusses the goals of using PSP and its application in the undergraduate curriculum, Section 4 presents results from actual classroom experience and Section 5 discuss...

The Impact of the PSP on Software Quality: Eliminating the Learning Effect Threat through a Controlled Experiment

“…Some qualitative analyses have shown that undergraduate students in PSP courses were concerned more with programming than with software process issues and that they were not ready to appreciate the benefits of addressing those issues [13][14][15]. In these works, the students were applying PSP in introductory programming courses during their first year of university studies.…”

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“…Existen iniciativas satisfactorias en el plano académico, con sus respectivos métodos, para enseñar un proceso de software en cursos básicos utilizando el PSP [37], en que se reconoce lo prematuro que es en estos casos introducir completamente sus conceptos [8,19,26]. También se pueden encontrar experiencias positivas aplicando PSP, aunque con algunas adaptaciones, en otros cursos como por ejemplo, introducción a base de datos [34].…”

VDM over PSP: a pilot course for VDM beginners to confirm its suitability for their development

“…We have already found several reports of lectures using the PSP [6,7,12,11,14], and most lectures use the subset of the PSP. The reason is that there is not enough time and effort in such lectures.…”

“…Software process improvement is achieved by evaluating the data with respect to several metrics. The evaluation of the PSP also contributes for students to know the benefits of particular methods [6,12].…”