A willingness to do it right the first time. I find any time I take on "technical debt" it almost always bites me in the rear latter. A good VCS and the abili

A willingness to do it right the first time. I find any time I take on "technical debt" it almost always bites me in the rear latter. A good VCS and the ability to use it. Spiral development with strict YAGNI. Do it right but don't over engineer. Automated Tests. Not because I am all that big a fan of tests but because if you write it to where it is easy to test it is often better designed. Code that is written with everything you need to do to unit test is often written with lower coupling and better cohesion because you are thinking about how to take out this one little part to test.