Yes, it can be applied to anything, but might not pay off with software like it does with semiconductors? Better tests and more static analysis are useful, but teams will often work on making their releases faster and easier, iterating more frequently, and then testing some things in production. We don’t want our software to be too brittle, so it should tolerate more variation in performance.

But with chip design, they can’t iterate that fast and performance is more important, so they are doing more design and testing before the expensive part, using increasingly elaborate simulations.