Code quality is essential to keep us Agile; poor quality creates technical debt, the sum weight of which will slow us down. Working with low-quality code feels a little like moving through treacle; changes that we thought would be simple turn out to be much harder than we expected.
When considering measurements to help us ensure code quality is high, we should look to measures that help us identify and remove technical debt from our system.
A good analogy is to think of it a bit like weeding a garden. It's a constant chore that we need to keep doing, usually as part of other tasks, rather than a particular job that we do in its own right. Even if we're just walking through the garden on the way to somewhere else and see a weed, ...
