[nightski]

Well it would likely be better to have a discussion about it then? Instead of a brewing conflict among members of the team? It's also where leadership comes in. Someone needs to make a decision and guide the team in a particular direction. The most important thing is not that he/she chooses the "best" way (implying one engineer was "wrong") but rather simply that a way is chosen and everyone follows it.

[RogerL]

I have to disagree, no bugs is better than some bugs. Pushing a change that introduces bugs is wrong (without the scare quotes).

This (sw design) is a multidimensional optimization problem with a somewhat vague cost function. But argmin on the # of bugs and argmax on feature completion is far more important than everyone following some random standard.