The risks of traditional software development

I worked in corporate IT for more than 20 years before I joined Google and dedicated most of my professional career during that time to developing code aimed at monitoring applications written by colleagues or sold by third parties.

Having witnessed, and also suffered, a lot of failures and issues during all those years, I will try to summarize all the potential risks of traditionally developed software that I can think of, in no special order.

Software bugs

Software bugs are undoubtedly the most frequent risk for developers. The quality of the code that we write does not entirely depend on our coding skills: a tight deadline, an excessive workload, or bad communication leading to a poor requirement-gathering phase may be among the varied reasons that can make it more probable for unexpected issues to be detected during the life cycle of our software, which we will need to promptly address.

In my opinion, code reviews are one...