This episode is about the Software Engineering Institute’s Personal Software Process (PSP), a particular disciplined way of improving a software engineer’s work. We talk about other the process in particular, and the idea of a continuous improvement process more generally.
I also introduce the SICPers newsletter and mailing list where I collect audio, video, and text from my journey to become a better software engineer, and to share what I learn with you. Please consider signing up, the first issue lands tomorrow (at time of writing)!
Hi Graham,
I bought A Discipline for Software Engineering pretty much when it came out. This was early on in my career and at the time when speaking with other colleagues there wasn’t much interest on applying engineering principles to software development.
They were very much used to a waterfall methodology and I guess it worked well enough that there was no compelling reason to change things. I saw a lot of value in the book’s concepts and tried to share them, lending the book out only to never see it again.
Two years ago, I decided to revisit the book, found a used copy and re-read it. Although I do still see value in a lot of the content, I think it could be updated/modernized taking into consideration many of the more recent techniques and concepts used in software engineering. Maybe this has happened since it first came out, I’m not sure. I do think that working in an environment where there is different/little or no software engineering practices creates a large barrier for someone wanting to adopt their own PSP.
Cheers
slm_objc