[eru]

The automobile industry has heavy regulation for their engine (and similar) software, and their code seems to be pretty poor.

The big internet companies, like Google, Facebook etc, have no regulation on their code, yet adopt practices like code review.

Banks have pretty bad software quality, too. (I worked for one bank, and talked to lots of people.) Though that's a generalization: there's lots of places for software in a bank. The parts that directly handle the money tend to have less bugs emerging day to day, but that's more because of low velocity and operating within known parameters (so as not to trigger any lurking bugs in the edge cases).

[lewisl9029]

I think it has more to do with the fact that in the case of Google, Facebook, etc, i.e. everyone that takes software practices seriously, software is their product. They live and die by the quality of their software: how fast it runs, how bug-free it is, how easy it is to change and extend, how well the reputation of their software practices can attract the most talented software developers, etc.

For everyone else, software is an expense: it's something to be minimized and gotten over with as quickly as possible so they can direct their resources towards solving business problems in some other domain that actually brings in the cash.

[CountSessine]

I've never heard of any regulations governing software in ECUs in automotive. Do these exists anywhere? Does anyone actually regulate this? Because ECU software is typically very bad.

[dagw]

There are general road safety standards like ISO 26262 that car cover electronics and software.