The Impact of Process Discipline on Personal Software Quality and Productivity

One of the underlying assumptions of the software process movement is that increasing process discipline—the consistency with which one implements best practices—improves both the performance of developers and of the software products they build. This assumption underlies models and standards such as the Capability Maturity Model. Exactly what “improves” means depends on the business context, but typically it refers to productivity and quality. The Personal Software ProcessSM (PSPSM) can be used to demonstrate the impact of process discipline in a rigorous statistical sense. PSP can be used to show higher productivity and quality following the adoption of disciplined processes, but it also illustrates some of the challenges in defining these concepts in a useful way.