I would like to propose a Developer's Hippocratic Oath that would start with: "First, do no harm". ¹ Too often, a developer makes a change to a system that later proves to be disruptive or harmful. Yes, humans will always find a way to introduce bugs into code; however, we can all strive to reduce the impact of those bugs by:

• Understanding the infrastructure and tooling support, and pledge to make it better by automating more of it. Time spent automating things here reduces the chances of manual error later.
• Adopting a culture of testing. Unit testing tools are ubiquitous at this point. Even if you can't test everything, you can start by testing something.
• Fostering a spirit of continuous improvement in both talent and code. Take the time to refactor that code that bothers you. If it bothers you, it bothers someone else. Remember, refactoring requires discipline and unit testing to be complete!
• Fixing a bug at the source of it's error, rather than applying a band-aid further downstream - regardless of the schedule pressure.

Anything else you care to add before we codify this?

Nitpicker's Corner²

¹Yes, I know that the exact phrase "First, do no harm" is not actually in the Hippocratic oath. However, it is pithy and memorable and serves the purpose and intent perfectly in this context of establishing a new oath for Developers. If we want to vote on just naming it the Misercratic Oath for Software Developers (thanks, Steve!), we could go that way, too.

²With apologies to Raymond Chen.