[agentultra]

Liability. If there were actuaries able to accurately assess the risk of your engineering practice you'd have a much different approach to software development in many niches than, "see what sticks and iterate."

My colleague is working towards becoming a licensed engineer in software. I'm learning a lot about formal methods from him in order to build more reliable software, faster.

If we really were software engineers then there would be a state of the art and if you employed any practices short of that you'd be liable for damages your software causes. And you'd probably go out of business pretty fast.