Conclusions

There are a few things I hope I could have convinced you and the most important is that Software Quality:

is expensive, but not having quality is much more expensive in the long run: The cost of unplanned changes, unplanned staff relocation, unplanned failures and outages and so on are only as big as the size of your own mess. As the rest of the universe, information systems' entropy will only increase if not actively maintained.
must be done by all teams and preferably all institutes: When a few teams increase quality and others decrease the unbalanced dynamics will unnecessarily increase the work of those caring about quality. They will eventually stop (especially upon staff relocation) and the chaos will reign again. The entropy of a system decreases at the expense of others'.
must be accepted by the user and enforced by an expert team: Users must be ready to receive no as an answer when quality is at stake. Costs must be evaluated by an expert team which in turn must have the powers to gather developers' opinions about quality and build a set of internal rules, enforce them throughout the institute and protect the teams from over-demanding users. Software engineers are most of the time eager to increase their software's quality but often lack time or priority to do it, thus the quality enforcement to managers and users is even more important than to engineers.
is not just a list of good practices but a huge amount of hard work: It's not just by using some patterns and writing some tests that your code will be protected, tests are useless when they aren't complete, outdated documentations and hard-coded libraries are also useless, everything must be done right not just a few.
makes users, managers and developers happy: When things were done right, changes are welcome, staff relocation (or illness) are not a problem, users won't need to request infinite small features because they'll know how to properly use the ones ready and managers can predict deliverables much easier.

If you weren't convinced, please let me know and I'll try to write it in a better way of give more examples.

For further readings I recommend you the following subjects:

Quality assurance
Design patterns and anti-patterns
Agile development
Functional programming
Machine architecture and software engineering
On-demand data flow and process automation

A list of recommended books is on the way.

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