[nradov]

Of course it's possible. I've done it. This requires a pretty high level of discipline and near 100% automated test coverage. Test scripts have to be written concurrently with product code, or at least prior to merging any code to the release branch.

I don't believe that software was actually higher quality in the distant past. That seems like selective memory. I've been in the industry long enough to have used a lot of products that shipped on physical media. There were many defects that we just lived with. Vendors frequently issued patches or dot releases on additional discs to fix defects.

[JohnFen]

I'm also an old-timer, from slightly before personal computers were a thing.

> There were many defects that we just lived with.

There were, indeed! What the most common defects look like is a bit different now than then, but I don't think software now is generally any less buggy than software then. The main difference is that now software is increasingly unreliable in the specific sense that it updates so frequently. Very frequent updates mean that things are constantly in flux. In my view, that alone is a decline in software quality.

[8n4vidtmkvmk]

Not just 100% unit test coverage but e2e integration tests too. My company really struggles with the latter because they take forever to run and they are flakey as heck. Most of our bugs are from badly mocked services.