Following up from the previous post ‘How Most Traditionally-Developed Software is Failure-Prone‘, the same Atlantic paper ‘The Coming Software Apocalypse‘ provides with a possible solution: automated software production from a basis of system modeling.
System engineering and system modeling is a modern, powerful manner to describe complicated systems and embed in a systematic manner all applicable requirements. It also includes powerful verification and validation techniques and approaches that allow to check in an exhaustive manner the behavior of the system.
Software code can be automatically generated from the system model. This unique code, specific to the application, might not be easy to read, but it can be proven to be consistent with the intent. In particular it will not contain the traditional 90% of supposedly unused code that plagues most modern software platforms. And it can be fully verified and validated thanks to dedicated tools.
This might spell the doom of manual coding, but seems to be the right way to progress to eradicate random errors from software that has become over the years too complex.
