Parameter identification of permanent magnet synchronous machines is a topic of utmost interest these days. The growing effort and investment in this field of research is largely due to the ever-expanding market share of these machines. The high-performance and efficient control of the drive depends on the accuracy with which the information about the machine connected to its terminals is available. The available identification methods are surveyed here and they are classified into offline and online strategies. Self-commissioning, in principle, is a subset of offline methods, yet it is treated separately for its importance in modern adjustable speed drives that tend to minimize the user intervention. Fully exploiting the power electronic converter and the computational power on-board a modern drive, the self-commissioning feature can be embedded in the start-up routine of the drive to estimate the parameters of the machine at hand. This paper presents a review of the parameter identification techniques and schemes investigated over the past few decades.