All stakeholders need to participate in a basic process that allows them to develop and operate the expected software as planned.

A PSP process is basic process that engineers use to produce high-quality deliverables. A TSP process is basic process that project teams, managers, and other stakeholders use for improve their software development management (Note 1).

While these basic processes focus on software development management, any development process, engineering or testing method can be used. Agile methods such as SCRUM and XP (Note 3), OOA / OOD, Story Mapping, SA / SD, etc. can all be used.

In order for engineer to generate high-quality software meeting with requirements, they use the following four basic principles, execute them along with the process, and explain them all:

• Planning process: Search for a best and simple conceptual design, make the development plan, and produce the software.
• Development process: perform engineering work from requirements analysis through testing.
• Quality process: Create and track quality plans. Defect detection and root cause resolution, etc.
• Improvement process: identify deficiency in process and quality,resolve them, and reflect them in the process, etc.

In particular, you learn how to explore conceptual design as simple as possible from requirements, estimating methods that generate values not differ greatly from actual values statistically, and approaches to achieve high quality consistently.

An engineer who performs these basic processes is called aself-directed engineer or a PSP engineer and acquires the basic skills to steadily carry out software work even when participating in projects from home or from a remote office.

These basic skills are easy for everyone to acquire in short period of time. Some of the class feedback messages and data are as follows (Note2,4):

• No missing required functions
• Estimated sizes and efforts indicated 90% close to the actual values.
• The total defect density at the start of training reduced to 1/5 or less at the later training.
• Productivity from planning up to unit test remains largely unchanged throughout training.

Senior managers are actively involved in launching a project team, and the PSP engineers work on the project planning and building the team to be trusted on managing the project.

1. Senior managers explain business needs, development goals, and challenges to PSP engineers at the team launch meeting, and ensure the engineers' understanding and expectations through Q&A.
2. The PSP engineers hold workshops, create the project plans and propose the plans to the senior managers who in tern, review, negotiate, and approve the plan.

PSP engineers of a self-directed team build their best cooperation among them on their own.

• An engineer, who understand requirements and expectations of project, systems, and team member skills, leads the team in identifying a best conceptual design.
• An engineer, who is good at planning and analyzing data, leads the team members in sharing works on planning, measurement, estimating, and monitoring and in identifying and resolving anomalies.
• An engineer, who is familiar with design, selects design-strong engineers who provide support to other engineers to create good designs and resolve "defective designs and codes" before testing. etc.

Senior managers, managers, and team managers ensure team management and motivating self-directed teams.

• Explain how the development project is important and what growth the engineers are expected at team building, and instruct them to include the action plans and supports in the team plan.
• Instruct the team to include regular and non-regular management reviews in the team plan.
• (Team Leads coordinate) at team meetings, team members assess the project progress, plan support for the team members in shortfalls, and make the plan, and so on.

We train PSP instructors and TSP coaches to ensure that the above is implemented within the organization.

PSP instructors provide PSP training for engineers and seminars for executive seminar and team leaders. TSP coaches provide coaching to TSP teams.

This allows to train PSP engineers as many as needed in a timely manner and also provide sufficient coaching to TSP teams, even as projects increase.

Here are some examples of feedback from engineers, teams, and managers (Note 2):

• Good cooperation within the team and contributed more to the project than I expected
• I had the opportunity to listen to senior managers and customers, and we were able to respond quickly to the requests
• Reduced test costs by up to 80% and increased productivity by more than 25%.
• Keep actual costs and schedules within ±5% of estimates
• The agility of the TSP team is higher than SCRUM,XP, and other Agile methods (Note 5)
• I understand that building a self-directed team is necessary for the software business

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Order for taking TSP courses

Figure 1 shows a flow of which TSP courses need to be taken in order to realize a self-managed engineer (PSP engineer) or a TSP team. The number in ( ) represents the number of course days.

For xample, a TSP coach candidate engineer may take the courses in the order of P1, P2, T1, L1, and C2.


If you are considering taking a TSP Course, please refer to the "TSP Course Registration" page, or the "Contact Us" page for questions and consultations, and we will reply.

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Note 3. Agile methodology is an iterative approach to software delivery. Build and distribute software step by step from the start of the project. https://www.sei.cmu.edu/our-work/agile.

Note 4. Class data is statistical data such as average, maximum/minimum, and quartile of student data in a class.

Note 5. Caper Jones, Software Engineering Best Practices: Lessons from Successful Projects from Top Companies, 2009/05, McGraw-Hill Education

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