[jstimpfle]

The most important ingredient by far is competent people. Those people will then probably introduce some static analysis to find problems earlier and easier. But static analysis can never fix the wrong architecture and fix the wrong vision.

In the industries I've worked, it's not a huge problem if you have a bug. It's a problem if you can't iterate quickly, try out different approaches quickly, bring results quickly. A few bugs are acceptable as long as they can be fixed. I've even worked at a medical device startup for a bit and it wasn't different, other than at some point there need to happen some ISO compliance things. But the important thing is to get something off the ground in the first place.

[addaon]

> The most important ingredient by far is competent people.

Having competent people is a huge time (cost) savings. But if you don't have a process that avoids shipping software even when people make mistakes (or are just bad engineers), you don't have a process that maintains quality. A bad enough team with good processes will cause a project to fail by infinite delays, but that's a minor failure mode compared to shipping bad software. People are human, mostly, and if your quality process depends on competence (or worse, on perfection), you'll eventually slip.

[hakunin]

You'll slip and regain your footing a few hours later without much loss in most industries.