I think this is sort of right ... but: "Hey boss ... this code the other vendor handed off to us is really bad code quality. We'll need to rewrite it or it's

I think this is sort of right ... but: "Hey boss ... this code the other vendor handed off to us is really bad code quality. We'll need to rewrite it or it's going to take 10x as long to do the feature than what we initially estimated." "Hm, that's not good. I'll talk to the customer." <later> "So that's how long it will take without a rewrite." "That doesn't sound right. I'll ask the other vendor how long it will take them to implement the feature." <later> "The other vendor did it in two days. Your team is fired." <later> "We've got another round of bug reports from the field. Also a class action law suit from angry customers. Also the product killed someone." "Someone died? It's a website how is that even possible?" "One of the many bugs causes the screen to flash wildly. Someone viewed it who was sensitive to flashing lights and had a violent seizure that ultimately claimed their life." ----- Without a separate objective code quality metric, you can't determine between two parties who argue about what the code quality is. It could be someone isn't willing to spend some time learning something new. It could be that someone is just unfamiliar with the code. It could be that someone is cutting corners and writing dangerous code. All you can do is to pick the people with the best track record and hope that you don't find out you choose wrong after spending millions of dollars and burning a lot of customer good will. Because of this, it would be really nice if we had a different way to measure code quality besides: "The software developers are complaining about it."