With software the pertinent metric is the number of quality-adjusted life years (QALY) lost. Most software systems don’t directly kill people but the amount of stress and wasted time incurred by poorly-designed dysfunctional systems does add up.

Perhaps, but you have to weigh that against the cheaply-made programs that save people a lot of time but would never have got made (or would be decades late) if the author had been obliged to follow "best practices".

As an aside, nobody making a claim about life lost uses QALY (or any other metric that devalues old people dying slightly sooner than they otherwise would have) because it doesn't make for impressive headlines, sound bytes or claims. Much more impactful to say that X people died from exposure to X than to say a bunch of people in their 70s and 80s and a couple in their 50s died of <some disease that is a result of X exposure> because they were exposed to X. Reality rarely makes for impressive headlines.

> Nobody making a claim about life lost uses QALY because it doesn't make for impressive headlines, sound bytes or claims.

And because the actual measure only addresses, even in principal, quality related to health conditions (though you could apply the basic methodology to construct a broader quality measure), and because the entire theoretical construct by which it assesses quality adjustment is, to put it mildly, suspect.

> With software the pertinent metric is the number of quality-adjusted life years (QALY) lost.

Except that QALY is a bullshit metric based on economic doctrine that is unsupported empirically (and, arguably, in their specific application in QALY, outright disproven.)

Software in cars, planes, other types of transportation. Medical software, military programs, the software used by civil engineers,..

There's probably lots of software where it could play part

Not to mention the phone apps that keep users so addicted they can't look away to operate heavy machinery.

If a crane falls over because the operator was playing Candy Crush, I think that can be placed squarely in the category of "user error".

> Not to mention the phone apps that keep users so addicted they can't look away to operate heavy machinery.

Or cars while they are crossing the roads. I see this daily.

Oh, good point. Do you have any statistics handy on how many people are killed and maimed by inattentive pedestrians? It would be useful for contrasting with [0].

[0]: https://crashstats.nhtsa.dot.gov/Api/Public/Publication/8124...