Sometimes it takes another person to connect the dots for you, and it wasn't until I saw Arlo Belshee deliver his #BugsZero talk at Agile Singapore 2016 that something changed. Up until that point, making bugs an avoidable occurrence was a light with a dimmer switch at about 50%; now it was fully on.

For a number of years, up until that point, I'd worked on teams that had very few bugs in their production environment, few enough per year to be countable on one hand. To get to this point, we had to adopt behavior driven development and worked closely with our customer. We used Continuous Integration and Delivery and avoided long-running feature branches like a very contagious disease.

Previously, we had identified a great deal of technical debt in our system, but by using a Technical Debt Heatmap, we had made it visible. We had then managed to slash out technical...