[!cite] The ease with which an organization can safely and confidently change its software is a marker of the software’s quality.*
Other authors
[!cite] There is no real trade-off between quality and speed: The way to go fast is to maintain good quality. In the long run, low quality only ensures that we will go slower, as we’ll have to fix errors and deal with the fallout of technical debt. Neglecting quality creates a vicious cycle that drags down a team’s velocity. In contrast, investing in technical excellence (clean code, refactoring, testing, etc.) sets up virtuous cycles: achieving Continuous Delivery requires high code quality and small batch changes, which in turn enable faster, safer releases. Quality is what lets you move faster over time. Eduardo Ferro - My Premises about software development
The Code Quality Advantage: How Empirical Data Shatters the Speed vs Quality Myth by Adam Tornhill