There can be no rapid iteration, because every bug is disastrous. As a result, software evolves at a glacial pace. Having spent 4 years building software at la

There can be no rapid iteration, because every bug is disastrous. As a result, software evolves at a glacial pace. Having spent 4 years building software at large investment banks, both on the coding side and on the managing side, I can affirm without hesitation that the glacial pace has very little effect on the (high) incidence of bugs. The quality of software produced in banks is generally appalling. The reason it's slow is because the complexity is sometimes very high, the volumes of data to process are often very large, and the communications overheads between bank departments are just insane. Quality (or lack thereof) has nothing to do with it.