I'm telling you, there's money to be made building tools for this stuff. I think a big part of the reason things aren't being improved is that the people in a position to recognize bad process and tooling maybe aren't the type of people to see an opportunity to make money solving the problem rather than putting up with it. I wouldn't associate most of the engineers I knew at Honeywell as the type to stay up until 2AM every night for 3 months working on a side project to pitch to their boss.
I think it's really exciting what's happening in healthcare right now though. The innovative culture is exploding. Ultimately I care much more about what happens in medicine than avionics, as long as planes aren't falling out of the sky every 248 days...
We're actually integrating more and more of our work in to Visual Studio since its tools are excellent. The problem is that the organization needs to validate any tool before we can use it as a part of Quality Management and that process can take forever.
Bizarrely now I am also helping (in a small way) with an innovative healthcare tech project. Maybe many people go through similar trajectories in programming without realizing it.
NASA and the U.S. Military have good guides and white papers on it, which you should be able to find online with a bit of digging.
[1] http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/V-Model_(software_development...
That said, our software development process is really just a mild adaption of all our other development processes (like ones we use for hardware and reagent development). As I've described it above, it's a pretty standard engineering approach to design control, and there are all sorts of variations on them.
In fact, the FDA makes note of how broad the field of medical devices are, and does not actually enforce any specific design control process, but rather provides a framework for you to develop a process that meets your developmental and regulatory needs. As part of getting FDA approval, your design control process will be audited, as well as how well you followed it. In addition, medical devices are classified into 3 classes, corresponding to patient risk. Our product is currently classified in the lowest risk level, and so we can avoid a lot of additional requirements. As I recall from skimming through the standard (sorry, we only had a hard copy at work.. costs money apparently), higher risk devices with software components must have certain types of tests performed. In our risk class, we have total freedom to define our testing requirements - that said, the rigour of our testing is still under FDA scrutiny, it just means that there are no specific checkboxes to hit (like integration testing for example).
I guess if you want a place to start off, this might be a good place to look: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Design_controls