[mpweiher]

>use formal methods.

My admittedly very brief experience with formal methods was that they were actually less close to the "design" of the software than the code. So not sure that's a direction that will get us anywhere we need to go.

>in a way that forces us to keep them synced.

Why "synced"? Wouldn't it be better if those higher level designs were actually coded up and simply part of the implementation, but at a level of abstraction that is appropriate to the design.

We used to increase our level of abstraction, but now we appear to have been stuck for the last 30-40 years or so. At least I don't see anything that's as much of a difference to, let's say Smalltalk as Smalltalk is to assembly language.