For the naysayers, yes, this should be part of the engineering process. But there are thousands of teams of programmers not doing this. Arguably, they aren't doing engineering, they are coding, or something else. In which case you can correctly say "this is be part of the engineering process", and point out that teams (some of which I've consulted with) who ignore this aren't doing engineering.

And yet, the number of systems embedded in our daily lives that are built without "the engineering process" is stunning. They are not typically the essential systems, but just everyday things we depend on and for which the loss would be much more than inconvenient, but short of catastrophic.

The author's points may be a rehash of old news, or even trivial, for a substantial portion of HN readers, but for many programmers and their managers, this could make them part of the "lucky 10,000"[1].

1 https://xkcd.com/1053/