From Code to Customer: Measuring Software Quality Before Release

“When a metric becomes a target, it ceases to be a good metric.” - economist Charles Goodhart I feel that every discussion about metrics should mandatorily start with the above word of caution from Goodhart’s law. Metrics should inform decisions, not drive behavior in isolation. Without context, they can easily be gamed or give a false sense of confidence. Alright! With that disclaimer out of the way, lets talk about Quality Metrics for production readiness. What you’ll find here comes from the trenches — lessons from things that worked, things that didn’t, ideas that sounded smart but fell apart at scale, and blind spots I didn’t see until they hit production. I’ve owned software quality across industries like e-commerce, fintech, streaming, and SaaS — in startups, scaleups, and big tech. Your context may vary, but these insights should hit home for most teams shipping software. Why Should We Even Measure Quality? I believe there are three reasons to measure software quali...