In your work, you need to answer the question "why do we want to do quality?" with a resounding "because I can, and quality is good for me." In other words, you need to have a reason for quality. Nobody can give you this, your attitude towards quality is yours alone. Everybody can tell you whatever they will, and they can monitor and control you all they want, but if you are not committed to creating good quality, you'll produce the opposite the first moment you're left alone.

If you think that creating testable and maintainable source code is meaningless, you probably won't bother. If you see no reason to spend a little extra time in making sure your code is as clean and clear as it possibly could be, you'll leave it as soon as it seems to work or passes all its tests. If you don't have the drive to aim higher than the norm, you'll create code that is harder to integrate, more difficult to test, clumsier to extend than it could be. If you lack motivation, you'll inadvertently make your code unnecessarily complex. If you don't care, who will?

You need to care about what you and your colleagues produce. It mustn't be irrelevant to you if your code breaks in testing, or if a customer finds failures in it. You, as well as all your colleagues, must strive for quality. You must decide that's what you want, and you're on the right track. If you then have the necessary capabilities and enough time, you're close to success.

The conclusion of Chapter 3. "Root Causes" is that there are exactly four ultimate reasons for failure in software. One of them is lack of motivation.