I happen to believe you get "quality software" by giving devs "ownership" of a piece of the software.

And by ownership I mean they come back to it on every revision of the software. They add the new features, they fix its bugs ... they can burn it to the ground if they like for reasons of technical debt (or because they feel like it).

"But what if that engineer leaves and no one else understands the code?" I hear you ask.

So what. We're smart. Put someone smart on it and they'll have it figured out soon enough. Chesterton’s Fence be damned, if the new dev wants to burn it down, let them.

You have to accept some risk in this field. But also you have to allow other's the responsibility. And in my experience, they'll rise to the occasion.

The groups I was in that claimed to be Agile rotated devs around the project like, um, cogs.

I mean, that works if you give them ownership of the budget and revenue targets.

That means if the product does not meet the revenue targets, the development team decreases and the development team has to decide which of their developers are losing their jobs.

That way, when the dev wants to burn it down, they are playing with their own consequences. Autonomy comes with consequences.