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Keith McIntosh wants to offer an objective eye to software developers around the world.

The CEO of local firm PQA leads a team that tests programs for everything from errors in binary code to spelling mistakes on setup pages.

"What we offer is quality assurance," he said. "(Software companies) hire us to find defects that need to be fixed before the product goes out the door."

Many companies may be reluctant to shell out cash for tests they could conduct on their own, but McIntosh said PQA is better equipped to do so because it offers an outsider's perspective.

"The developer's job is to make it; our job is to find out how to break it so they can anticipate how to prevent that," he said.

"It's a different skill set ... If you create something, you're too close to it - you'll see what you want to see. We tend to be an advocate for the client as much as we can, looking at it from the user's eyes."

PQA works to be an advocate for the clients of companies such as Atlantic Lottery Corp. and testing its software to ensure every jackpot's numbers are properly crunched.

Filogix - a Toronto-based firm that develops programs for banks and mortgage brokers from coast to coast - enlisted PQA to enure its software wouldn't slow certain networks to a crawl.

But PQA doesn't just fish for flaws in software development - it also tests the content of programs.

Lydia.com is a Los Angeles-based site that produces online video tutorials. It hired PQA to mend the mistakes and mispronounced words of the videos' narrators.

Intuition Publishing, an e-learning company from Dublin, Ireland, sells a SkillSoft-like program used to train bank employees and investment advisers. PQA was hired not only to sift through the program's code for errors, but to check its hundreds of pages of content for proper grammar and spelling.

McIntosh said those offshore clients are key to PQA's business, and that ethic helped the company garner a KIRA (Knowledge Industry Recognition Award) nomination last month.

He said software testing is an industry in itself, contributing up to 50 per cent of development costs and compelling companies such as Microsoft to hire one full-time software analyst for every five designers.

"Any good developer can write a great piece of code," he said. "But we want to ensure it not only lets the software do what he expects, but also what the user expects.

"Creating software is done on such a tight deadline that they need a third party to look at it from not just a creative point of view, but from a customer's point of view."