Will you please elaborate?
Imagine if every software company was obliged by law to:
- Every single release has to have been signed off by someone who got their "software release engineer" certification at the software equivalent of the FAA.
- This engineer is required by law to not sign off unless every box on a 534 item checklist has been manually verified.
- Any time an unplanned downtime happens at any company, a government team comes in to investigate the root cause and add points nr 535 through 567 to the checklist to make sure it never happens again.
If such a system was mandated for software companies, most of the common bugs would very rapidly become a thing of the past. Development velocity would also fall through the floor though, and most startups would probably die overnight. Only companies that could support the overhead of such a heavyweight process would be viable, and the barrier to entry would massively increase.
The rebuttal to your implied Goodhart's Law <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law> that was offered by my manager was "tension metrics" <https://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/IT_Service_Management/Contin...>
If I understand his theory correctly, in your case there would be a competing metric to the "test coverage" one that said for any changeset, a test cannot itself change by more than 20% in the same changeset as non-test code. So you can change the code such that it still passes the existing tests, or you can change the test to adapt to new requirements, but you cannot rewrite the tests to match your newly changed code
I'm acutely aware this is a terrible example, the devil's in the details, and (in my experience) each company's metrics are designed to drive down their own organizational risk <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_law>, combined with "you're always fighting the last war" :-D
The entire thing is terrible from principle. You won't find a good example, because that's not how you use a process checklist.
It's specific to the complex and unsafe C++ language though, rather than addressing broader software development methodology.
That's the reason why aviation can only shine when it becomes a private means of transportation, and I don't mean 70mm private jets but, 150k light helicopters.
When a critical mass is hit then accidents will become no more traumatic to the collective psyche than car accidents, the lighter the aircraft the better because it would seem exactly like a car crash as opposed to leaving a huge burning hole into the ground