Great story of "market-based" engineering management & collaboration, where different teams could trade resources (in multiple categories) with other teams to optimize each component while staying in-bounds with the mission requirements.
Certainly a good example of the strategic use of markets as a tool, mixed with a whole lot of planning.
Raise your hand if your digitally scanned signature is on the CD-ROM they placed onboard Cassini.
Didn’t it burn up in Saturn’s atmosphere?
Lucky
Maybe the software world can learn something about planning long and planning ahead
For typical software, there is no point. A satellite can travel for decades and provide invaluable data with the software side focus being mainly maintenance and keeping it going (+ maintaining a piece of electronics millions of miles away moving at thousands of miles per hours is pretty much a unique challenge). Typical CRUD applications get continuous changes/modifications, bugs are not catastrophic and the applications themselves routinely get replaced as part of the evolving architecture. Putting the kind of testing and effort done for Aerospace for such applications would be a waste of effort. Of course like everything else, there is software and there is software. Software used in nuclear plants don't see such velocity of change + the impact of things going wrong would be catastrophic - that can definitely do with such rigour.