How is this kind of thing handled in the medical and aviation industries?
Since you ask, I'll draw on what I've learned from my childhood best friend (an electrical engineer who worked first in the aviation industry and now in the medical device industry) and my son (who was a summer intern for a medical device company). Simply put, safety-critical devices are heavily regulated in those industries, and everything new is assumed to be safety-critical by default. My son's summer work designing the doctor-facing user interface of a new bedside patient monitor was subject to a line-by-line code review by programmers on the FDA staff. He estimated that the product he worked on would take six years to get to market, even thought it was just version 2 of a device that already worked and had clinical usefulness. Federal government regulators try to be extra careful in review of new software that protects human lives in those industries.
Since you ask, I'll draw on what I've learned from my childhood best friend (an electrical engineer who worked first in the aviation industry and now in the medical device industry) and my son (who was a summer intern for a medical device company). Simply put, safety-critical devices are heavily regulated in those industries, and everything new is assumed to be safety-critical by default. My son's summer work designing the doctor-facing user interface of a new bedside patient monitor was subject to a line-by-line code review by programmers on the FDA staff. He estimated that the product he worked on would take six years to get to market, even thought it was just version 2 of a device that already worked and had clinical usefulness. Federal government regulators try to be extra careful in review of new software that protects human lives in those industries.