Herc708:
Do you have a source for that, or have you merely grafted cherry-picked details of real-time development (like two separate teams) and applied them to a rant about software application development you found on the internet?
Bis47:
I presume you're referring to the DC-10 cargo door incidents, or possibly the Comet 1- in both cases those are down to an insufficient level of understanding of a systems-level failure (the door failing, causing the floor to fail and take the cables and hydraulic lines with it in the case of the former, and the fuselage being stress-tested in sections but never as a whole in the case of the latter). In the case of safety-critical software, systems-level failure is something that was understood from the get-go.
Again I'm groping for an analogy, but the level of discipline required for application development as compared to safety-critical real-time software is like comparing the discipline levels of an occasional Sunday jogger to an Olympic-level marathon runner.
And the "improvements" to the software (just as with airframe hardware) come from lessons learned while flying the line. No airframe, whether controlled by string and pulley, hydraulics or FBW has got it right straight from launch.
(Waits for 411A to post "But the TriStar...."
)