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> Software dev is generally a scattershot haphazard endeavor that involves trying dozens of angles until one of them works.

Maybe in an agile web startup. SW engineering in a big industry project is a very deliberate process. You start by a requirements engineer writing very precise requirements. Then a SW engineer turns this into a module design and a test specification. These are turned into source code (for which we use code generators to an ever higher degree) and test cases by yet other SW engineers. In the end everything gets reviewed and/or tested.

Trying things until they work is just not done. That would be way too dangerous for SW that controls cars, airplanes, nuclear power plants, rockets etc.



Safety critical software is a small subset of the software that gets written in "big industry" projects.

There are hugely more systems not written to that standard.


Yes, but those systems are engineered in the exact same processes. Just with less testing and fewer documents.




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