I have to admit that I am glad not to be a software developer these days. It's been a while (about 13 years since I wrote code for a living) and things just seem to have gotten out of control. When I was an OS developer we had one Project Manager whose job it was to handle marketing and features. For the whole OS and he was part time. Most of the OS group was hard pressed to see the need for his job. As a team we knew our customers (we talked to them - imagine that) and we were able to develop plans for upgrading the OS on our own.

We had no SDE/Ts (software developers whose only job was to test other people's code) at all. Released products had fewer bugs back than as well. In the 20+ years since I was an OS dev I have not heard of any patches against code I wrote back them.  But then all I worked on were minor features like printing, batch processing, logging in and out and how often are those obscure features likely to be used. :-)

But I am not a great dev. I make no pretense about being a great developer. I found it hard and it had stopped being fun for me. Today I code only small things either for fun or for teaching purposes.

When I was a dev the idea of someone whose full-time job it was to test code was just starting. I was actually part of a group that did write test code but we were working with a complete system test of systems that involved dozens of computers and scores of disk drives. Nothing so simple as an OS that ran on a single PC or an application would have gotten that sort of attention. People were expected to test and debug their own code. It was a point of personal responsibility. 

I suspect that some would say that projects are two complex today. They may be right on one level. If, however, they are right then what they have identified is a huge part of the problem. Large projects should be broken down into smaller less complex pieces.

I don't know where things went wrong but it scares me.