Technology: Can You Automate Software Quality?

For most of the past few weeks I have been moderating an intense and evolving debate on software quality for one of my clients. The software engineering organization is struggling to balance speed of development (which is in many ways their proxy for market responsiveness), quality of deliverables, and lifecycle cost (their deliverables are potentially in use for many years and have a significant ongoing engineering cost). The software's requirements are often fluid, during and after development, and it's critical that it be both highly reliable and scalable to millions of users. With a few thousand engineers involved, it's also critical that some common understanding of "quality" is in place and agreed to.