Software Engineering Institute

The 2013 TSP Symposium was organized by the Software Engineering Institute and took place September 16–19 in Dallas, Texas. The goal of the TSP Symposium is to bring together practitioners and academics who share a common passion to change the world of software engineering for the better through disciplined practice. The conference theme was “When Software Really Matters,” which explored the idea that when product quality is critical, high-quality practices are the best way to achieve it. In keeping with that theme, the community contributed a variety of technical papers describing their experiences and research using the Personal Software Process^SM (PSP^SM) and Team Software Process^SM (TSP^SM). This report contains the four papers selected by the TSP Symposium Technical Program Committee. The topics include demonstrating the impact of the PSP on software quality and effort by eliminating the programming learning effect, analyzing student performance during the introduction of the PSP using an empirical cross-course comparison, incorporating PSP practices into introductory programming courses, and analyzing factors affecting productivity performance in PSP training.