Jasmine: A PSP supporting tool

Abstract

The PSP (Personal Software Process) was developed to help developers make high-quality products through improving their personal software development processes. With consistent measurement and analysis activities that the PSP suggests, developers can identify process deficiencies and 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 collect reliable data, which can lead to wrong analysis results. Also, it is very inconvenient to use the paper-based process guide of the PSP in navigating its process information and difficult to attach additional process-related information to the process guide. In this paper, we describe a PSP supporting tool that we have developed to deal with these problems. The tool provides automated data collection and analysis to help acquire reliable data and identify process deficiencies. It also provides an EPG (Electronic Process Guide) in order to provide easy access and navigation of the PSP process information, which is integrated with an ER (Experience Repository) to allow developers to store development experiences.