It is one thing to write code and another to write good code. The subjectivity of code quality is greatly reduced by having coding guidelines/standards. Whether a developer follows coding standards or not can be verified by subjecting the code to a code review. On the other hand, there are tools that automatically perform these reviews against defined standards.

In addition to code quality, programming best practices also recommend writing automated unit tests for the code. The line and branch coverage achieved by these unit tests can also be quantitatively measured by tools.