I see it as an Agile vs Waterfall thing.

Waterfall works great, if and ONLY if, you know 100% for sure exactly what you're requirements are at the beginning of the project and they never change significantly. This seems to be mostly true-ish for aerospace. Nobody's going to pivot the Falcon 9 into being a washing machine next week.

It seems to me that the point of Agile is that Waterfall fails hard if you have no idea what you want your business software to actually do. Agile is an attempt to build a reasonable software development process around that reality.

So when you get down to it, the lack of rigor isn't so much in software itself as in business. If you don't have any idea what your business is going to actually do, no software or engineering process can fix that.

> Nobody's going to pivot the Falcon 9 into being a washing machine next week.

I may have to borrow that.

An alternative explanation: we're so in a hurry that we don't want to take time out to decide what it is that we are going to build, and so we embrace the fact that we don't know what we are doing and put a sexy label on it, because hey, who doesn't want to be Agile? It sounds so much better than 'clueless'.

Most of the time, we don't care that much about what we're going to build. The actual goal is "build whatever makes money". In FOSS circles without money it's often "whatever gets users" instead.

If I'm doing a custom project that does some sort of warehouse management for a client, I'm not really deeply invested in my particular vision about how a warehouse should be managed. I'm deeply invested in making my client happy.

In terms of software development and testing practices, what the military/aerospace/medical industries do would never scale to any other industry. If the law were to mandate those practices across the board, that might sound great, but it won't matter because you won't be able to afford the resulting products.

It would scale just fine. Software would cost a bit more, profits would go down a bit, quality would shoot up and support costs would drop. I wouldn't be surprised if it was a net positive in the longer term.

But in a world dominated by quarterly earnings this won't fly.

Not necessarily advocating for it, but if that would mean less bloatware, de-facto spy-ware and lousy, pointless apps, or god forbid even les social media apps, I would call that a net positive.

It would catapult the industry back to the 1990s, at best.

How "at best" is interpreted is obviously up to the individual, of course.

Given Boeing’s recent history, I’m not sure aerospace knows how to do software well either.

That's a regulatory problem, not a software development problem. Simply put: that plane should have never been certified under that type.

True. I would even argue that the software and hardware Boeing developed did exactly what it was supposed to do.