The Team Software Process (TSP): An Overview and Preliminary Results of Using Disciplined Practices

The Software Engineering Institute has developed the Team Software Process TSP to help engineering teams more effectively build software-intensive products. The TSP addresses many of the current problems of building software-intensive products and shows teams and managers explicitly how to address these problems. This report describes the TSP technology as an implementation strategy for teams that are attempting to apply disciplined software process methods. It provides some of the background and rationale for the TSP approach, as well as an overview of the technology. Then, the report presents initial results of the use of the TSP technology in four different organizational settings. In each of these organizations, the data show that defect densities found in system-level test activities and the actual duration of these system-level tests were reduced significantly with the use of the TSP. In addition, the accuracy of software estimates improved, and the variation in estimation accuracy was significantly reduced. Based on the analysis of these results, some assertions are made to help organizations set goals for improvement.