Doing some project lit. review a few years back, I came upon the area of component-based software engineering (CBSE), where the idea was to mirror the same kind

Doing some project lit. review a few years back, I came upon the area of component-based software engineering (CBSE), where the idea was to mirror the same kind of manufacturing approach as in electronics. You'd write a software component to do one thing, and have well defined inputs and outputs, and you could then "simply" compose complex systems by chaining lots of these software components together. Nice idea by maybe software engineering wasn't/isn't that formulaic as more well-established engineering disciplines.