And we showed them that “You should be able to get in the test, and it should run the test first time. You’re not gonna get into here and run the test to find out where your problems were and fix the ones that hit, you’re gonna actually get it to run the first time. The thinking here is this makes the entire development process more consistent, it makes it more predictable, and it gets you a much higher quality product in the end.

So there were a handful of adopters, and the people who were in these PSP courses were from industry. There were some university classes, but 90% of the data was from industry; it was from organizations that we were working with, trying to teach them how to manage software projects. And part of the training was taking the PSP course.

So the developers on the team would all take the course, they’d learn these techniques for how to estimate it, how to improve quality… And then we’d use that to help them manage their project. And we had some very notable successes with that. I could go into a few examples, but probably the most spectacular was the rewrite of the BursaTech trading engine. You’ve probably never heard of it, but BursaTech is the stock trading engine they use in Mexico… And they were falling behind, and there really are only a handful of engines in the world, a handful of those big trading engines for stocks, derivatives and so forth… One of them was in Mexico.

Their choice was either rewrite it, because it couldn’t keep up with modern times, or buy the one they were using in New York or London. So they decided to rewrite it. And they with a relatively small team - I think maximum was a couple dozen people - it took them a little over a year. They put together probably about 500,000 lines of code. They had to run it in shadow mode before it went operational.

In the first year of operations it had a total of downtime that was in the order of minutes. Literally, minutes of downtime. And their performance was about a factor of ten. They could handle about ten times the number of transactions of any system that existed at the time.

So that was part of the benefit of doing things right the first way, doing things in a disciplined manner. That was kind of where all of this PSP training was coming from.