Evaluating Instructor Role in a Personal Software Process Improvement Course Based on the Process Data

The Personal Software Process (PSP) is a well-designed personal software process effective for software engineers in understanding and improving their performance accompanied by training courses to establish and improve their software development processes. In this paper, we evaluate the importance of instructors’ role in the PSP courses. The PSP for Engineers is one of the PSP training courses offered by the SEI, where participants learn the knowledge and skills for developing high-quality software through lectures and exercises led by instructors. The lecture materials for the course have been available under a Creative Commons license from October 2018, and participants can self-learn PSP without the guidance of instructors. However, for example, it is not always easy to collect accurate and precise process data, the basis for improvement. We expect instructor guidance plays a major role in effectively improving software processes. In this paper, we analyze the importance of PSP instructors’ role based on the students’ process data collected in the PSP for Engineers course at our graduate school over years.