Confidence as a measure of quality

I’ve been thinking about the word ‘confidence’ this week and how it could give an indication to measure quality. It is very biased and only from my viewpoint. Imagine I was working on a new product capability and they are wanting to push it out very rapidly, however, my confidence level was about 2 out of 10. Then as time went on — more visibility, better collaboration, higher test coverage, fixing of bugs — which eventually landed me on a 7 out of 10 confidence.

I have experience of this before where in a planning session you can give a confidence vote as a team. Have a read of this to see what I mean.

Looking at this there is a scale

1 — Major concerns. Little or No Confidence.

2- Significant doubts. Some confidence

3 — Some Reservations — Neutral

4 — Confident

5 — Highly confident.

So I wonder maybe if I could think about what the criteria would be in each of these scales when it comes to quality. What does highly confident mean for example? Could it be it meets the expectations of users? Low bug count? something else?

What are your thoughts on this? How could we start an initial experiment to see if this would work or not?