Chapter 8. Construction: We Build PSP Tools

Construction is the phase where development teams , especially the programmers, do what they know how to do best ”implement the software. Some people think that the Construction phase is all about programming, but this phase involves more than just writing code. As described in the RUP hump chart, each discipline usually applies some effort in every iteration. During the Construction phase, the Implementation discipline is predominant, but significant work is done in analysis and design, testing, and configuration management. The PSP Tools project illustrates this point quite well.

This chapter describes our journey through the Construction phase. We started by examining our tools and fine-tuning our environment. We planned the iterations, started implementing code slowly, then developed our own rhythm and became productive.