History of Personal software process

It's driven by research on software quality improvement.

1970s and 1980s

W. Edwards Deming and J.M. Juran convinced U.S. industry to focus on improving the
way people did their jobs [Deming 82, Juran 88].

the first major step in the direction pioneered by Deming and Juran

was taken by Michael Fagan when in 1976 he introduced software inspections [Fagan 76,

Fagan 86].

Another significant step in software quality improvement was taken with the initial introduction
of the Capability Maturity Model (CMM) for software in 1987 [Humphrey 89, Paulk

95].

A further significant step in software quality improvement was taken with the Personal Software
Process (PSP) [Humphrey 95]. The PSP extends the improvement process to the people
who actually do the work—the practicing engineers. The PSP concentrates on the work practices
of the individual engineers. The principle behind the PSP is that to produce quality

software systems, every engineer who works on the system must do quality work.