PSP e métodos ágeis na melhoria da qualidade em produção de software: um estudo de caso / Improving the quality of the software production using PSP and agile methods: a case study

AUTOR(ES)
DATA DE PUBLICAÇÃO

2006

RESUMO

Small and medium sized software development organizations face challenges to develop quality software. Costs to adhere to international quality standards are very high, making it almost impossible to adopt and acquire maturity evaluations based on those standards. One plausible and less expensive way to increase product quality is investing in personal software development processes. Part of quality problems are a direct consequence of relying too much on tests as a quality assurance mechanism. That makes defect detection and removing an expensive, non effective and unpredictable step in software development. Previous results from the literature show that tests must be associated with error prevention procedures in early development steps, blocking error propagation to later steps where their removal is much more expensive and prone to more error insertion. Requirements elicitation, analysis and understanding seem to be a crucial point in the whole process. This is an error prone step, particularly when requirements have to be extracted from human actors that communicate with analysts and software engineers using everyday language. This work describes the design of a hybrid personal process to be used in quality software production. It is derived from a tiny intersection of PSP (Personal Software Process) that is an instance of Plan Based Methods, with TDD (Test Driven Development) that is an instance of Agile Methods and is also focused on the personal level. The hybrid process so obtained is called PSPm, where the m stands for modified. It was obtained by introducing the test-first technique from TDD, in the PSP Design phase. This means programmers should design tests before coding even small slices of software, and they should use those test cases in testing software after they are coded. PSPm was tested by Computer Science students enrolled in Software Engineering I classes at Universidade Federal de Viçosa, in the years 2004 and 2005. Data gathered in 2005 were then compared to data gathered in 2004 in the same discipline. Results showed that using PSPm lead to a smaller error injection rate in PSP Design phase, thus leading to a smaller testing mean time. Data were processed and analyzed using the Resampling Tests bootstrap technique, applied to the data gathered in both years.

ASSUNTO(S)

ciencia da computacao engenharia de software software software development programação extreme software engineering desenvolvimento extreme programming

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