At PSL, quality is not a step in a process –such as “here begins the quality control procedure” but rather a philosophy and cultural trait that permeates every aspect of our software development, from requirement analysis to acceptance testing. 

Like the Japanese, we seek to “do it right the first time” and –because we will not be perfect, no matter how hard we try—we also seek to find and fix problems early.  This philosophy is ever more relevant in software development, where finding a bug in the initial stages of coding an application is 60 times less expensive –in both time and effort-- than correcting the same error once the software has been released (not to mention the collateral damage to a company’s image caused by releasing a buggy application).

Over the past 13 years, PSL has invested more than 5 million dollars in the study and practice of best practices in the field of software engineering.  We are CMMi level 5 –were the first in Latin America to receive the award—yet consider ourselves methodology agnostic.  We find value in both structured approaches that follow RUP, as well as Agile methodologies that seek to deliver products ultra fast under changing business environments. 

Not being wedded to an approach, we will adopt the development methodology that best fits the situation at hand.  What we will not compromise, however, is the ability to monitor our performance objectively and systematically.  Whatever the development situation –whether it be an Agile team working under SCRUM or a large deployment following RUP—we will measure our productivity, our error injection rate, the customer’s satisfaction with each functional iteration of our code, and other metrics that will keep us honest in our promise to produce world-class software from Latin America. 

Today, we are proud to announce that in the past three years we have produced, on average, software code with less than 0.6 defects per 1,000 lines of code in 24 months of operation, delivering our applications faster and cheaper than most of our peers in the industry who also publish such statistics.