Quality happens when people feel like they are allowed to invest the time to clean up. Telling someone they are an owner is one way to do that.<p>Most companies base your performance only on new features, creating a culture of fear around refactoring (&quot;I would love to refactor that, but it&#x27;s not going to put any points on the board in Pivotal, so I&#x27;ll just wait until some unspecified future day when the refactoring will get scheduled as a project.&quot; Which of course never happens because product owners are also judged based on new features.<p>Ownership has a bunch of negative side effects, particularly around balkanization of styles and practices. Which isn&#x27;t to say it&#x27;s not the right choice in many situations.... it absolutely is. But to say it&#x27;s the only way to get quality is just wrong. Another approach would be to encourage coders to add refactor stories to their queues and include those in performance reviews. Or have dedicated code quality engineers.<p>Almost anything where you can make people believe that cleaning up is part of their job will do the same trick.