Jasmine : design and implementation of a PSP supporting tool

Abstract

The PSP is developed to help developers make high-quality products through improving their personal process. Among various methods and practices that the PSP provides to assist in improving their personal process, the measurement and analysis is central in identifying process deficiencies and providing a focus for process improvement. Sets of historical project data also are used to make reliable estimates on effort and quality. However, due to the high-overhead and context-switching problem of manual data recording, developers have difficulty to acquire reliable data. Also, the paper-based process guides to help developers follow the PSP process are inconvenient to navigate the process information and difficult to attach additional process-related information such as examples of an artifact. In this thesis, a PSP supporting tool, named Jasmine, is described that we have developed to address these problems. Jasmine provides automated data collection to help acquire reliable data, by mitigating the high overhead and context-switching problem. Jasmine also provides an electronic process guide for the PSP in order to provide easy access and navigation of the process elements, as well as an experience repository to store, share development experience.