[vemv]

My (tragically) favorite part is, from wikipedia:

> A commission attributed the primary cause to generally poor software design and development practices, rather than singling out specific coding errors.

Which to me reads as "this entire codebase was so awful that it was bound to fail in some or other way".

[rgoulter]

Hmm. "poor software design" suggests a high risk that something might go wrong; "poor development practice" suggests that mistakes won't get caught/remedied.

By focusing on particular errors, there's the possibility you'll think "problem solved".

By focusing on process, you hope to catch mistakes as early as possible.

[DamonHD]

When trying to make better systems in moderately-critical roles (investment banking, not medicine though) my approach was both try to understand and fix the immediate fault, but also find out if (and fix if so) any systemic issue that would make other related errors likely.

[ycombobreaker]

Sibling reply notes the "process" is the problem, amd I would second that. I would also like to add, it's perfectly possible to produce a high quality code base with poor practices. This can happen with very small, expert teams. However, certain qualities become high-variance, which becomes a hazard over time.