[littlestymaar]

You would be very disappointed if you knew how medical software is made. For instance most of it can crash without issue (and in practice, it does a lot!): all you need is to assess the risks that could result from a crash and mitigate it (for instance: the device should be designed in a way that stops doing anything as soon as its software crashes).

I've been a contractor for a medical devices company for one year, and the process where really lightyears away from what you are describing. Nothing even forces you to write and run unit tests…

Yes, that's scary.

[gmueckl]

Sounds like one of my previous employers.

The next company I worked at was industry, not medical, and this one did it right. So while there's black sheep out there, not all of them are.

Side note: whether a device can fall back to becoming inert on a failure depends on the type of device and the specific risks involved with that failure mode. It may be that stopping to do anything is the wrong thing to do, e.g. in a blood pump.