Having worked in the flight test industry in a 'prior work life', nothing that this article describes sounds especially interesting or novel. I think what happe

Having worked in the flight test industry in a 'prior work life', nothing that this article describes sounds especially interesting or novel. I think what happened is that when the planes started getting technologically intense and at the same time the development team became highly distributed (geographically and contracted), there was a period of time where things 'got out of control' in that a) the design/simulation tools didn't have good capabilities for dealing with this level of distributed/revisioned work b) it was more important to 'get the job done' than making sure that everyone used the same exact toolchain and was working on the same version of the model etc. Eventually this caught up with them and they experienced some significant issues (like the wiring snafu the article mentioned, and I also recall another issue where fuselage parts wouldn't mate up), which finally made the industry pull back and get serious about fixing these design tool/practice issues.