To be fair, a lot of traditional science and engineering follows the same pattern. I'm a SW dev embedded in an R&D engineering organization and the main differe

To be fair, a lot of traditional science and engineering follows the same pattern. I'm a SW dev embedded in an R&D engineering organization and the main difference is that SW development has faster cycles and less established practices but if you scale up SW dev timelines to match ME and EE cycles it's not that different. Preventing bugs is something especially our materials and system interaction engineers are very aware of. You don't want a consumer product to fail in the field and cause damage or harm so that's goal #1.