How to bridge disciplinary gaps?

Sonali, I would venture to say that the problem stems from a lack of communication. I've seen in many organization that requirements would be documented and given to the dev team without any discussion (I'm not going to jump on the agile wagon). Typically in these situations estimations were given on best guess and sometime just to get the monkey of my back. In reality however the task might take much longer due to complexity not understood, missing details etc. When they then try to make a deadline under pressure the result is sloppy work and missed deadlines.

So before I look at how to resolve discipline I would try and identify the cause. BTW you might already have done this?

It is not the job of the PM to "discipline" employees this is the responsibility of the functional manager. In the majority of cases the software developers and the software developing project managers are at the organizational level peers which means that the PMs don't have the authority to discipline developers.

Software development is a creative activity and because of this, unless we are talking about trivial tasks, it is impossible to give accurate estimates. Also bugs are inevitable no matter how many unit tests you are writing. Probably Microsoft developers do write unit tests but ever since the release cycle for Windows has moved to 6 months the system has had a series of sever bugs. It is much worse than previous systems that had a much longer release cycle.

In some cases developers do have to be disciplined if they don't perform their job properly but missing dead-lines or producing many bugs is not a criteria for determining that the developers are negligent. You need managers with technical background in software development to determine this or other mechanisms that exclude the opinions of the people that have never written a line of code in their lives.

You need to get your hands dirty in software development and get to a reasonably good level before you can understand these things.

I agree with Ajay here in a way.

That being said, you can ask EOD status by sharp 6 PM or so and basing on that, you can pose questions to them.

When I asked status in a company where I was working, they said, earlier managers( before me) never asked!!!. I told them that till I get a better handle, I needed it. So it took couple months.