Software project improvement through Personal Software Process in a R&D center

Any software engineer with a working experience greater than a few months knows about the problems that projects face to reach the planned goals, on-time and on-budget, and that when they are not cancelled. When thinking about software process improvement, several methodologies can be found on the literature. In this paper, we will talk about how to employ these toots in a specific case, a R&D centre where already exist a quality culture and some tools to reach it. Despite this, their software projects suffer from the same general illness of over-budgeting and delaying. The method we propose is based in the Personal Software Process (PSP), that differentiates itself from other process improvement systems -more focused on the company's general structure and organizational issues- in that it deals with the personal and individual work of the developer. Based on previous experiences on the use of PSP and taking into account the particular characteristics of the workplace we are studying, some tools are proposed and described along with a process for their introduction.