Diseño e implementación de una herramienta de soporte para la metodología PSP (Personal Software Process)

Abstract

During software development the product must have the best quality, ie, minimum number of errors during development and after it is finished, there are many methodologies that are made to contribute to the quality of a development and Personal Software Process is one of them, but its application involves a lot of extra work and the available support tools doesn’t fulfil all that is required in a support tool. This article presents a tool that has been developed using quality components, allowing the developer to focus on his project and methodology. To achieve this it was necessary to look for good usability practices, things that make a usable tool and ways to test the usability of the tool. A qualitative and comparative method that consists of 8 tasks, done in a group of people who do not know any tool of support of the methodology and another group with people who at least has used the tool exposed in this article. Both groups of people fulfilled the tasks in a shorter time when they used PSP Connect, additionally the average errors was of 6,6 whereas when they used Process Dashboard the average errors amounted to 16. In conclusion the goal of including usability in a tool that supports the methodology was achieved, the testing approach helped to ensure the implementation of the quality components defined by Nielsen. It is also important to test the tool in a community that has experience using the methodology and using the Process Dashboard or PSP Student Workbook, so the tests wouldn’t be limited or affected by components that are normal When the methodology is used.