Professional engineers have been stamping and signing off on safety-critical software for decades, particularly in aviation, space, rail and medical instrumenta

Professional engineers have been stamping and signing off on safety-critical software for decades, particularly in aviation, space, rail and medical instrumentation sectors. Whilst less likely to be regulated under a "professional association" scheme, there has also been two decades of similar stamping of security-critical software under the Common Criteria EAL scheme. The question is whether formal software engineering practices (and associated costs) expand to other sectors in the future. I think yes, but at a very slow pace mainly due to high costs. CrowdStrike's buggy driver bricking Windows computers around the world is estimated to have caused worldwide damages of some USB$10bn+.[1] There will be cheaper ways seen to limit a buggy driver bricking Windows computers in the future other than requiring every Windows driver be built to seL4-like (~USD$500/SLOC) standards. If formal software engineering practices are implemented more as years go by, it'll be the simplest/easiest software touched first, with the highest consequences of failure, such as Internet nameservers. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_CrowdStrike_incident https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_CrowdStrike_incident