Abstract: Software Quality has different meaning to different people. The ISO 9126 standard was developed to introduce clarity and establish a framework for quality to be measured. This paper aims to explore how Internal Quality characteristics of a software system (source code) can be measured effectively. Instead of relying on traditional software metrics, which are shown to be a poor predictor of underlying software quality, we advocate measuring compliance to a coding standard. We show qualitative and quantitative evidence of how adoption of a coding standard helps organizations in improving the quality of their C/C++ software.