The cultural issues are usually the largest issue (qv. Conway's Law). You don't need to stop writing new code, but you do need to stop adding crap code (or at l

The cultural issues are usually the largest issue (qv. Conway's Law). You don't need to stop writing new code, but you do need to stop adding crap code (or at least stop adding it faster than you can clean it up). It's why I'm a big fan of code ownership as a negative reinforcement tool. Despite it being a really bad idea, it does tend to rein in the cowboys - because they're too busy fixing the bugs in their code to add new ones.