Engineering Management

The Quality Ceiling: What Software Quality Means Once Your Application Has 100+ Developers

Software quality stops being a property of code and becomes a property of seams between teams somewhere between 50 and 200 developers. This post names the four failure modes unique to that regime — Conway's-law drift, cognitive-load overflow, federated quality, incentive inversion — and closes with a manager's playbook: what to measure (the four DORA metrics), what to change (four ≤90-day interventions), what to stop measuring (four counter-metrics inversely correlated with quality), and the one question that separates an organisation that is improving quality from one that is merely paying for the appearance of it.