The Team Software Process Reading Notes (Continued 2)

Once there is an overall plan, engineers can develop quality objectives and plans at the 5th meeting. This Plan defines the quality activities to be adopted by the team in the future and provides a measurable basis for tracking the quality of work. During the preparation of the quality plan, team members estimate the number of defects that may be introduced at each stage and the number of defects eliminated, and the number of defects that may exist during system testing, customer acceptance testing, and product final release. Then, at the 6th meeting, team members formulated detailed plans for the upcoming phase and further confirmed the resources of the entire team, to ensure that all tasks in this detailed plan can be assigned to team members. In this way, we get a team plan after the trade-offs. At the 7th meeting, engineers defined major project risks and graded them based on their similarity and influence. At the same time, the team should assign a team member to track each risk and prepare a mitigation plan for the relatively important risk.

After the team completes its plan, the team members will hold a 8th meeting to prepare for detailed review by the management. During the 9th meeting, they were reviewed with the management. During the meeting, the Team explained the plan and described how it was generated, indicating that all team members agreed and made a commitment to the plan. If the team does not meet the goals of the management, it is generally necessary to prepare and submit an alternative plan and describe the resources required for the plan or the changes in requirements. The primary reason for submitting an alternative plan is that the team can provide an alternative plan to the management if the plan developed by the Team does not meet the business requirements. At the end of the TSP launch, the Team and the management should reach an agreement on how the team should proceed in the project.

In the last step, the Team reviews a launch process and submits process improvement suggestions. The Team also collects and records launch data and materials for future use.

The TSP teamworking Process

Once the launch process of the TSP team is completed, the main purpose is to ensure that all team members follow the plan. This includes the following main content:

* Lead Team * process discipline * problem tracking * Communication * Management Report * Maintenance Plan * Evaluation Project Completion * balance team workload

* Relaunching project * TSP Quality Management

Leading the team

Team leaders are responsible for guiding and motivating team members, handling customer issues and dealing with management. This includes daily work orientation, protecting team resources, solving team problems, organizing team meetings, and reporting. All in all, the main responsibility of team leaders is to maintain the initiative and energy of the team and ensure efficient work. A key leadership responsibility is to maintain process discipline. Here, the team lead ensures that the engineers work as planned. This work process is defined by themselves during launch. While doing this, team leaders supervise the work to ensure that everyone complies with the process and plan developed by the team. Almost every project is facing severe progress and resource pressure, so there is always one or another test. However, when the team does not work according to the process they originally set up, they cannot say they have done what they should do. When supervising the process discipline, the team lead should check whether each team member has recorded his/her process data, reported his/her weekly status, and produced high-quality artifacts.

Another important responsibility of team leaders is to ensure that all issues reported by team members are managed and tracked. After Using TSP, engineers usually discuss some issues at weekly team meetings. Team leaders should first check whether the problem should be handled by the team. If the problem is handled by the Team, designate a member to manage and track it. In the end, the team follows up on each issue and records the logs, and reviews all significant issues at each weekly meeting.

Communication

Team leaders are responsible for maintaining open and efficient team communication. It is difficult for Members to maintain motivation when they do not know the project status, what other Members are doing, and what challenges they have. Communication is a key part of maintaining team energy and motivation. Promoting communication is one of the key responsibilities of team leaders.

During the weekly meeting, the team leaders should first summarize the project status and management concerns. Then the team members summarize their work in this week, the work in the next week, the activities of their roles, and the risk status they track. They also asked their questions and explained what kind of help they needed in the next week.
The team leader also has an important responsibility: to report the Team status and process information to the management. TSP requires the team to make a weekly report to show where the team is going according to the plan. This process also requires regular, truthful, and complete customer status reports.

Every week, the TSP team uses the Earned Value Method to track the project process as planned. For Earned Value, each task is assigned a value based on the percentage of the total project evaluation. If a project has 1000 hours of tasks, a 32-hour task should have 3.2 plan values (PVs) or 100*32/1000 = 3.2%. When the team completes this task, the engineer should accumulate 3.2 earned points (EV), regardless of how long it took and how much it cost.