Lessons learned from teaching reflective software engineering using the Leap toolkit

After using and teaching the Personal Software Process (PSP) (W.S. Humphrey, 1995) for over four years, the author came to appreciate the insights and benefits that it produced. However, there were some general problems with the PSP. These problems led him to begin work on an alternative software process improvement method called reflective software engineering. Like the PSP, reflective software engineering is based upon a simple idea: people learn best from their own experience. Reflective software engineering supports experience based improvement in developers' professional activities by helping the developer structure their experience, record it, and analyze it. Unlike the PSP, reflective software engineering is designed around the presence of extensive automated support. The support is provided by a Java based toolkit called "Leap" . The kinds of structured insights and experiences users can record with Leap include: the size of the work product; the time it takes to develop it; the defects that the user or others find in it; the patterns that they discover during the development of it; checklists that they use during or design as a result of the project; estimates for time or size that they generate during the project; and the goals, questions, and measures that the user uses to motivate the data recording.