This is not on the same league. Your unit-test coverage example is closer to the Toyota incident. Surely, it was a catastrophe, and lives were indeed lost, but

This is not on the same league. Your unit-test coverage example is closer to the Toyota incident. Surely, it was a catastrophe, and lives were indeed lost, but no one actively inserted a "speed up when driver hits the breaks" feature into the firmware. A closer analogy to the VW case is if the build bot actually did exist, but you wrote some nefarious unit test that just spit out all OK results regardless of what the exercised code did, so that you were allowed to merge whatever crap your team produce, as long as it actually compile. If that is the case, we can discuss different possible assignations of responsibility, but you cannot claim that some good intentioned people just slide into misbehavior due to not paying enough attention. Someone had to be aware they were actively cheating!