A model for analyzing performance problems and root causes in the personal software process

Abstract

High-maturity software development processes, such as the Team Software Process and the accompanying Personal Software Process (PSP), can generate significant amounts of data that can be periodically analyzed to identify performance problems, determine their root causes, and devise improvement actions. However, there is a lack of tool support for automating that type of analysis, and hence diminish the manual effort and expert knowledge required. So, we propose in this paper a comprehensive performance model, addressing time estimation accuracy, quality, and productivity, to enable the automated (tool based) analysis of performance data produced by PSP developers, namely, identify and rank performance problems and their root causes. A PSP data set referring to more than 30 000 projects was used to validate and calibrate the model. Copyright (c) 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.