I'm not sure I fully understood the moral of the article but it seems to me that all of these findings are basically what "people knew for a long time". Okay it's good to put data on "beliefs" but is it really useful when quantifying "promoted usage" and "obligation" has failed?

The article does prove that some people tried to impose (via management or structure in large organizations) metrics on coding as a way to rationalize the development quality and miserably failed but clearly lack the counterpart: what happens when you don't impose these metrics? Experience is important but that's not new is it? In the end it just feels like: small programs won't have much problem as do small organizations - Big organization should function like small companies. Not much of an answer.

Also, I'm not sure that a manager saying something like "according to data, we need one more month to make the program 35% more stable" is a good argument (or even a new one). What would be interesting is to try something like "ship the program one month earlier and dedicate the two remaining month to fix what's broken according to feedback", then compare with the first approach.