PSP PAIR: Automated Personal Software Process Performance Analysis and Improvement Recommendation

High-maturity software development processes, making intensive use of metrics and quantitative methods, such as the Personal Software Process (PSP) and the Team Software Process (TSP), can generate a significant amount of data that can be periodically analyzed to identify performance problems, determine their root causes and devise improvement actions. Currently, there are several tools that automate data collection and produce performance charts for manual analysis in the context of the PSP/TSP, but practically no tool support exists for automating the data analysis and the recommendation of improvement actions. Manual analysis of this performance data is problematic because of the large amount of data to analyze and the time and expertise required. Hence, we propose in this paper a performance model and a tool (named PSP PAIR) to automate the analysis of performance data produced in the context of the PSP, namely, identify performance problems and their root causes, and recommend improvement actions. The work presented is limited to the analysis of the time estimation performance of PSP developers, but is extensible to other performance indicators and development processes.