by David St. Amand, NAWCWD Process Resource Team

In front of the U.S. Naval Museum of Armament & Technology at China Lake, five Naval Air Warfare Center Weapons Division (NAWCWD) civil service and contractor software engineers received their Certificates of Completion for the Software Engineering Institute (SEI) Personal Software ProcessSM (PSP) course. A disciplined engineering approach to software development, this grueling two-week course included ten lectures, eight software programming assignments, and two written reports. Overall, it was an effort equivalent to a one-semester or two-quarter college course packed into half a month. Having learned the PSP, these engineers now join an exclusive international community of high performance software developers.

The PSP is based on the Level Five practices of the SEI Capability Maturity Model Integration® (CMMI). Practitioners of the PSP measure their personal development process for writing software, analyze their process data, and then use that information to improve their software development performance. This offering of the PSP for engineers was provided by SEI-Authorized Instructors from the NAVAIR Process Resource Team (PRT).

Software engineers in fourteen Software Teams within eight Product Teams across NAVAIR use the PSP and its group extension, the Team Software ProcessSM (TSP). Through the use of PSP and TSP, these NAVAIR Teams are better able to meet their schedules, deliver high quality products, and realize cost savings from the avoidance of re-work. PSPSM and TSPSM and their constituent words are registered service marks of Carnegie Mellon University. CMMI® and its constituent words are registered trade marks of Carnegie Mellon University.

The Process Resource Team spans the NAVAIR organization in support of innovation and process improvement. It is a resource for improving systems and software engineering, acquisition knowledge and process through Model-Based Process Improvement. The services of the PRT are funded by the individual project offices to whom the PRT provides products and services. For more information on the PRT, please telephone David St. Amand at (760) 939-2372 or Del Kellogg at (760) 939-5494.

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Photo cutline: Software Engineering Institute’s August, 2009 Personal Software Process course graduates are joined by their instructors, from left to right: David Roy, Del Kellogg (instructor), James Aldridge, Eric Bosley, David Saint-Amand (instructor), Dieter Weik, Khanh Le and Brad Hodgins (instructor). U.S. Navy photo by Dan O’Connor