Watts Humphrey to train 50,000 engineers

Chennai-based Watts Humphrey Software Quality Institute (WHSQI) plans to train 50,000 engineers in personal software process (PSP) by December 2006. It will do so through a combination of courses in colleges and universities, and the IT industry.

WHSQI is a not-for-profit institute committed to spreading PSP and team software process (TSP) maturity frameworks in the Indian software industry.

TSP and PSP maturity frameworks assist individuals and teams to carry out those activities that are specified by capability maturity model (CMM) and capability maturity model integration (CMMI).

The PSP is an individual level model that helps individual engineers to plan their work, estimate the size, defects, effort and schedule involved in their work and to track these while working.

The TSP helps teams of PSP-trained engineers to be self-directed, to formulate team goals and to provide a framework that supports members to achieve goals that they have committed to.

These maturity frameworks have been developed by Watts Humphrey at the Software Engineering Institute (SEI).

According to a company release, it has been found that individuals of a high maturity company do not perform as per the CMMI requirements. An SEI report shows that the best delivered products have an average of three defects per thousand lines of code. " We need one to 10 defects per million lines of code," according to Watts.

At present, there are 500 PSP-trained engineers in India. Texas Instruments and Microsoft India are the big companies that have trained software engineers in the PSP and TSP maturity frameworks.

Currently, Microsoft insists that all the vendors that it sub-contracts its work to have professionals who are PSP and TSP-trained.