Treating software quality as a first-class entity

Quality is a crucial property of any software system and consists of many aspects. On the one hand, quality measures how well a piece of software satisfies its functional requirements. On the other hand, it captures how easy it is to understand, test and modify a software system. While functional requirements are provided by the product owner, maintainability of software is often underestimated. Currently software quality is either assessed by experts, or presented as a list of rule violations reported by some kind of static analyzer. Both these approaches are working with a sense of quality outside of the software itself.