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Results of applying the Personal Software Process

Too often, software developers follow inefficient methods and procedures. The Personal Software Process, developed by Watts Humphrey at the Software Engineering Institute, provides software engineers with a methodology for consistently and efficiently developing high quality products. The value of PSP has been shown in three case studies-three industrial software groups have used PSP and have collected data to show its effectiveness. They are: Advanced Information Services, Inc., Motorola Paging Products Group, and Union Switch and Signal Inc. Each has trained several groups of engineers and measured the results of several projects that used PSP methods. In all cases, the projects were part of the companies' normal operations and not designed for this study. The three companies offered a variety of situations useful for demonstrating the versatility of PSP. The projects at Motorola and US&S involved software maintenance and enhancement, while those at AIS involved new product development and enhancement. Among the companies, application areas included commercial data processing, internal manufacturing support, communications product support, and real time process control. Work was done in C or C++.

On the evolution and impact of architectural smells—an industrial case study - Empirical Software Engineering

Architectural smells (AS) are notorious for their long-term impact on the Maintainability and Evolvability of software systems. The majority of research work has investigated this topic by mining software repositories of open source Java systems, making it hard to generalise and apply them to an industrial context and other programming languages. To address this research gap, we conducted an embedded multiple-case case study, in collaboration with a large industry partner, to study how AS evolve in industrial embedded systems. We detect and track AS in 9 C/C++ projects with over 30 releases for each project that span over two years of development, with over 20 millions lines of code in the last release only. In addition to these quantitative results, we also interview 12 among the developers and architects working on these projects, collecting over six hours of qualitative data about the usefulness of AS analysis and the issues they experienced while maintaining and evolving artefacts affected by AS. Our quantitative findings show how individual smell instances evolve over time, how long they typically survive within the system, how they overlap with instances of other smell types, and finally what the introduction order of smell types is when they overlap. Our qualitative findings, instead, provide insights on the effects of AS on the long-term maintainability and evolvability of the system, supported by several excerpts from our interviews. Practitioners also mention what parts of the AS analysis actually provide actionable insights that they can use to plan refactoring activities.

Martin Zinkevich, PhD

Results of applying the Personal Software Process

Too often, software developers follow inefficient methods and procedures. The Personal Software Process, developed by Watts Humphrey at the Software Engineering Institute, provides software engineers with a methodology for consistently and efficiently developing high quality products. The value of PSP has been shown in three case studies-three industrial software groups have used PSP and have collected data to show its effectiveness. They are: Advanced Information Services, Inc., Motorola Paging Products Group, and Union Switch and Signal Inc. Each has trained several groups of engineers and measured the results of several projects that used PSP methods. In all cases, the projects were part of the companies' normal operations and not designed for this study. The three companies offered a variety of situations useful for demonstrating the versatility of PSP. The projects at Motorola and US&S involved software maintenance and enhancement, while those at AIS involved new product development and enhancement. Among the companies, application areas included commercial data processing, internal manufacturing support, communications product support, and real time process control. Work was done in C or C++.