Implement This One Cultural Characteristic to Build A Healthy Codebase

Technical debt accumulates until it becomes too much to bear and we have to carve out time for a big refactoring. Engineering teams try to adhere to one of Robert C. Martin’s (Uncle Bob's) many brilliant pieces of advice, ‘the boy scout rule’: leave the code better than you found it. Research shows that when team members own their work, are held accountable for it by managers, and take responsibility for successes and failures, all kinds of good stuff happens.