Well before tooling is considered, it has to involve people and process. At the highest level, you must have a culture of "blame the process, not the people" or people will do what is natural when things go wrong: try to cover it up and avoid being blamed.
There are procedures in various safety-conscious industries for handling this kind of development. I like that you used the word "systemic" because it is literally a systems issue, not a software, or electronics, or mechanical issue. The entire system has to be considered and analyzed for potential faults.
I spent over a decade writing code for medical devices and while the software aspect of these systems was the most advanced in terms of development process (unlike what many on HN seem to think :-), everything we did had to be considered from a system perspective because even if the individual parts were designed properly, it was possible for the interactions between them to cause problems.
There are procedures in various safety-conscious industries for handling this kind of development. I like that you used the word "systemic" because it is literally a systems issue, not a software, or electronics, or mechanical issue. The entire system has to be considered and analyzed for potential faults.
I spent over a decade writing code for medical devices and while the software aspect of these systems was the most advanced in terms of development process (unlike what many on HN seem to think :-), everything we did had to be considered from a system perspective because even if the individual parts were designed properly, it was possible for the interactions between them to cause problems.