One big caveat to this is formal methods. If we did formal methods for all production code, it would meet the highest definition for rigor and rest safely as a true engineering discipline.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Formal_methods

I find it especially ironic that the engineering professional regulator in BC (EGBC), in their guidelines on software engineering, mention as a specific example that a software engineer might need to rely on the expertise of a non-software-engineer who has specialist skills such as (by their own example) formal software verification methods!

this covers only the most technical fields that already specify things rigorously. most people arent technical enough to even understand what a formal spec is, so how do you deal with them? insist they learn formal methods?