Teams are made of people, and people are made of animals stretched to purposes far beyond any resemblance to the environment they were designed for / by. Anima

Teams are made of people, and people are made of animals stretched to purposes far beyond any resemblance to the environment they were designed for / by. Animals will have ingrained habits, many of these will be maladaptive. People though can create systems and systems can adapt for those habits. Do some cost/benefit analysis to enacting policies within the system that is your software development lifecycle. Assign people tickets, tag machines with their desired longevity and kill machines past their designated life span (or a default minimum), hold code reviews for new highly conditional methods and include drawing out truth tables and checking the desired behavior for each row. Lots of teams either expect everyone to be be an ideal spherical engineer and stumble when that proves not to be, or expect nothing of anyone and are doomed to achieve that expectation. The middle path of expecting excellence but tolerating failure is a lot of work but has plentiful advantages. How much failure you have to tolerate and how complex the systems designed to provide that tolerance are depend on the makeup of your team and its size (the larger your team the closer to the mean you'll have to be, and with more individuals a wider variety of behaviors will be represented).