> The most important ingredient by far is competent people.
Having competent people is a huge time (cost) savings. But if you don't have a process that avoids shipping software even when people make mistakes (or are just bad engineers), you don't have a process that maintains quality. A bad enough team with good processes will cause a project to fail by infinite delays, but that's a minor failure mode compared to shipping bad software. People are human, mostly, and if your quality process depends on competence (or worse, on perfection), you'll eventually slip.
Having competent people is a huge time (cost) savings. But if you don't have a process that avoids shipping software even when people make mistakes (or are just bad engineers), you don't have a process that maintains quality. A bad enough team with good processes will cause a project to fail by infinite delays, but that's a minor failure mode compared to shipping bad software. People are human, mostly, and if your quality process depends on competence (or worse, on perfection), you'll eventually slip.