NEED A NERD – Adapting PCSE (Practitioner Centered Software Engineering) to develop a Web Application

Abstract

Practitioner Centered Software Engineering (PCSE) is the most recent incarnation of Auburn University’s personal self-improvement process for helping software engineers control, manage, and improve the way they work. It helps them make accurate plans, consistently meet commitments, improve QPPC (Quality, Predictability, Productivity and Customer satisfaction), and deliver high-quality products. PCSE is a tailored collection of different elements from various software processes such as Personal Software Process (PSP), Team Software Process (TSP), Extreme Programming (XP), Feature Driven Development (FDD), SCRUM, Rational Unified Process (RUP) etc. PCSE was developed by Dr. David A. Umphress, Department of Computer Science & Software Engineering, Auburn University, in an effort to bring engineering discipline to one-person software development teams. The objective of this thesis is to apply PCSE to develop a web based application “NEED A NERD” using Django. Django is a web application framework written in Python. PCSE is a one-person team process and it has been used in the past for the development of conventional applications. It would be a challenge to follow PCSE in a web development environment (to develop a web based application), as it would require a few modifications in different phases in the software process and in producing the artifacts during the different stages. This thesis would give a good measure of how efficiently PCSE could be used in the development of web applications. On successful completion, the web application is expected to be used by the employees and students of the Department of Computer Science and Software Engineering at Auburn University for their on-campus job pursuit.