It's always a challenge to manage the entire project life cycle by balancing requirements and iterations or milestones based on priority and relevant quality gates. It takes great effort to put in necessary quality initiatives to attain high quality deliverables through various metrics which include project execution and design/code quality gates.
Fortunately, there are many tools and guidelines which help project/program/product managers, architects/developers and other stakeholders to orchestrate and manage the whole process for high quality software solution realization.
For example, Visual Studio Team Suite (VSTS) provides a suite of products with out of the box features for templates/metrics calculations and hooks for extending the environment further to incorporate desired quality gate measuring mechanisms, validation policies, templates, and so on.
While VSTS/Team Foundation Server (TFS) provides features such as MSF for Agile / MSF for CMMI and provisions for customizing templates for project governance/solution realization process, features like Code Metrics, Code Analysis, Architecturing Process tools & guidance, etc help managers, architects and developers exploit these tools and guidance for better quality approaches and predictable delivery.
A few useful links …
Application Platform Optimization
Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) Offerings
Team Development with TFS Guide
TFS 2008 Branching Guide 2.0
Visual Studio Team System Tutorial
Team Foundation Server Frequently Asked Questions
Visual Studio Team System: Process Templates and Tools
Developer Support Team Foundation Server
MSBuild & TFSBuildLab
Architecture & Design
Design/Code Metrics
VSTS & Testing
Unit Testing
Unit Testing Walkthrough
Pex & Unit Testing