Have you heard of defects per Lines of Code (Defects/KLOC). My company was asked to evaluate third party software application development. One of my measurements is to use Defects/KLOC.
You may argue that Defects/KLOC doesn’t supply enough information about Product Quality. But one thing for sure is if the rate of Defects/KLOC for the similar products is high, there is certainly something wrong with development process or developer skills.
I noticed that if development follows well defined architecture might help reduce such Defects/KLOC rate. This is what I noticed from evaluating one of Ruby on Rails projects.