Most software work in pharma and manufacturing is still CRUD, they just have cultures of rigorous documentation that permeates the industry even when it's low value. Documenting every little change made sense when I was programming the robotics for a genetic diagnostics pipeline, not so much when I had to write a one pager justifying a one line fix to the parser for the configuration format or updating some LIMS dependency to fix a vulnerability in an internal tool that's not even open to the internet.
Well, a hand watch or a chair cannot kill people, but the manufacturing documentation for them will be very precise.
Software development is not engineering because it is still relatively young and immature field. There is a joke where a mathematician, a physicist and a engineer are given a little red rubber ball and asked to find its volume. The mathematician measures the diameter and computes, the physicist immerses the ball into water and sees how much was displaced, and an the engineer looks it up in his "Little red rubber balls" reference.
Software development does not yet have anything that may even potentially grow into such a reference. If we decide to write it we would not even know where to start. We have mathematicians who write computer science papers; or physicists who test programs; standup comedians, philosophers, everyone. But not engineers.
Difference is that code is the documentation and design.
That is problem where people don’t understand that point.
Runtime and running application is the chair. Code is design how to make “chair” run on computer.
I say in software development we are years ahead when it comes to handling complexity of documentation with GIT and CI/CD practices, code reviews and QA coverage with unit testing of the designs and general testing.
So I do not agree that software development is immature field. There are immature projects and companies cut corners much more than on physical products because it is much easier to fix software later.
