Pilot PSP/TSP Project for the Western Cape

Cape Town and the Western Cape develops high quality, bold, “out of the box” software. Our challenge is, how do we “prove” to the world and potential clients that this is the case?

CITi and local software engineers led by Dr David Hislop (Korwe Software) and Dr Joseph Balikuddembe, backed by a mandate from the Third Software Engineering Colloquium, have been investigating a number of potential solutions – including certification and accreditation.

As part of this broader process, CITi began an engagement with the Johannesburg Centre for Software Engineering, which is running a pilot programme to explore the feasibility of adopting PSP and TSP in South Africa. The Department of Trade and Industry (dti) is supporting this pilot. Initial results of the pilot, being run at Nedbank and Dariel Solutions in Johannesburg, were presented to CITi stakeholders on 4 June 2010 and were very encouraging.

The “sales pitch” on PSP and TSP is as follows:

The “Personal Software Process” (PSP) and the “Team Software Process” (TSP) are complementary methodologies developed by the Software Engineering Institute (SEI) at Carnegie Mellon University in the USA. These methodologies, closely aligned to the Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI), are being adopted by an increasing number of software development teams in various parts of the world. There is a growing body of evidence demonstrating the advantages of TSP/PSP adoption. These advantages include:
• Software development projects are completed within 10% or less of the scheduled date. The industry benchmark is in the range 27% to 112%
• The final cost of development projects is within 5% or less of the original budget. The industry benchmark is in the range 17% to 85%.
• Released code is likely to have 0 to 0.2 defects per 1,000 lines of source code. The industry benchmark is 1 to 7 defects per 1,000 lines of source code.
• System testing requires between 2% and 7% of the overall effort (time or cost) associated with a development project. The industry benchmark is typically 40%.
• Companies using TSP are able to accelerate CMMI adoption dramatically. Some organisations have progressed from maturity level 1 to 4 in less than 2 years. The normal time taken is 5 years or more.

View the PSP presentation by Prof Barry Dwolatzky of the JCSE (4 June 2010)
Read CITi’s Report on the presentation

Based on the outcome of the first presentation, it was decided to establish a Steering Committee to further investigate two possibilities:

1. The identification of a pilot TSP site in the Western Cape
2. Investigation of the potential of PSP and TSP as a way of “proving” the quality of Cape software

The SteerCom is comprised of Mark Acton of Mobinomics (chair), Jenny McKinnell (CITi), Mike Eccles (UCT), Gert Tighy (Nehemia), Gerhard Esterhuizen (Yila Consulting) and Dr Stuart Warden (CPUT). (Additional members welcome. The group meets at the Bandwidth Barn from 10h00 – 12h00 on the last Friday of every month.)

Read the minutes of the first PSP/TSP SteerCom meeting held on Friday 25 June 2010

Following on the first SteerCom meeting, the SteerCom arranged for Jim Over, Team Lead of the Team Software Process (TSP) initiative from the Software Engineering Institute at Carnegie Melon University, to make a further presentation to CITi stakeholders on 19 July 2010.

View Jim Over of SEI of CMU’s presentation on TSP

A potential “red flag” for the Western Cape was raised in this presentation – namely the finding in the book titled Software Engineering Best Practices by C. Jones (2010) that in terms of software engineering best practice by size of application, for small businesses (which make up the majority of Western Cape software development companies) “Agile” is in fact a better methodology than “PSP/TSP.”

The second SteerCom meeting held on Friday 30 July 2010, grappled with this issue and other  more challenging issues related to cost and scalability. Read the Minutes of the SteerCom meeting held on 30 July 2010.

There was no SteerCom meeting at the end of August. The next meeting will be held at the Bandwidth Barn on Friday 1 October from 10h00 to 12h00. All welcome.

( This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it  if you want to be added to the PSP/TSP mailing group. This will ensure you get the minutes when they are released.)