The Team Software Process

The Software Engineering Institute has developed the Team Software Process (TSP) to help integrated engineering teams more effectively develop software-intensive products. This process method addresses many of the current problems of developing software-intensive products and shows teams and their management explicitly how to address them.

For example, hardware-software projects in even very experienced groups generally have cost, schedule, and quality problems. Testing is generally expensive and time consuming, and often followed by many months of user trials before the products are fully usable.

The TSP shows engineering groups how to apply integrated team concepts to the development of software-intensive systems. It walks teams and their management through a 4-day launch process that establishes goals, defines team roles, assess risks, and produces a comprehensive team plan. Following the launch, the TSP provides a defined and measured process framework for managing, tracking, and reporting on the team's work.

The TSP has been used with pure software teams and with mixed teams of hardware, software, systems, and test professionals and it has been shown to sharply reduce the total cost of development and acquisition. TSP has been used for both new development and enhancement and with both commercial and embedded real-time systems. Team size ranges from 3 up to 12 to 15 professionals for simple teams. Larger multi-teams can range up to several dozen professionals. Additional process extensions are required for larger teams.