Reputation

Your reputation, as a team that delivers well tested, on time, software is worth a ton. If you have a good reputation, people are willing to cut you slack, help you out if there are issues every once in a great while, etc.

On the other hand, if you always deliver late, always have bugs in your stuff, etc., people cut you little slack. At the first sign of trouble they reject your code.

I'm very glad we've worked hard to build a good reputation, and maintain it. It makes life so much easier when playing with others.

I'm sure this is something true in many fields - maybe not the same terms (on-time, low defect rate, etc.) - but generic terms like integrity, respect, etc. That's something the UofM was always very big on pushing in their computer science classes. Yeah... its important to get it to work, but the biggest goal is to do the right thing