[anovikov]

I had an experience with a German client in a software project. It freaked the hell out of me with slowness of decisionmaking, long contract every point of which as it turned out, was material, in a nutshell it was a 50/50 coding vs lawyer job and took 5x the time same thing would take with an American client. It also made me next to no profit.

But, unlike a lot of things we write for Americans, that one turned out to be actually workable, usable in their (rather large) product, and runs happily to this day almost 5 years later. I count it as a success and attribute it mainly to this boring, overly conservative and procedure-ridden work process.

But yes, i agree, that for software projects, virtues of this approach are more limited than in "hard" engineering, and probably do not outweigh downsides in many cases.