Quality as the Lifeline of R&D: Autohome’s End‑to‑End Quality Measurement and Continuous Improvement

Autohome’s CTO emphasizes that quality is the core focus of the company’s technology system, essential for delivering first‑class user experiences and for every engineer’s work.

Given the matrix‑style organization with dozens of technical departments, each previously using its own quality standards and tools, Autohome launched the “Crafting Premium Projects” initiative in 2022 to unify quality metrics across the enterprise.

The company built a company‑level, fine‑grained quality measurement framework that aggregates data from client, server, operations, and testing streams, creating a visual “quality compass” and defining standardized quality indicators and models.

Using the McCall product quality model, Autohome defines three perspectives—product operation, product correction, and product transfer—focusing on operation and correction, and breaks quality into five secondary attributes (maintainability, testability, correctness, performance, usability) with 16 tertiary metrics each, weighted to produce a percentage‑based comprehensive quality score.

To achieve end‑to‑end observability, the team deployed front‑end monitoring (Ftwo), App performance SDKs, and integrated existing infrastructure such as cloud dashboards, server logs, and CI/CD pipelines, while also developing custom tools like a quality gate to collect missing data.

The comprehensive quality score is calculated by aggregating weighted sub‑metric scores, normalizing them against zero‑ and full‑score lines, and presenting them as a 0‑100 scale, enabling transparent, comparable assessments across departments and projects.

Through this model, Autohome has realized multi‑dimensional, fine‑grained, visual monitoring of technical indicators, establishing a closed loop of quality monitoring, optimization, and feedback, leading to continuous improvement of user experience and the cultivation of a quality‑centric culture.

Future efforts focus on addressing high‑impact user‑experience issues—such as long white‑screen times, app crashes, and visual glitches—through targeted governance projects, reinforcing the commitment to deliver high‑quality technical products and exceptional user experiences.