There was actually a great story of the Space Shuttle software engineering team and their development practices. Generally speaking, they wrote code with zero bugs. Like...NONE. For 25 years.
They did it with an almost insane level of attention to detail.
Thanks for that link. I really like krschultz's parent comment and your follow up. Does anyone know how to get a single-page view of that article, though?
The process maturity index which used NASA/JPL as its exemplar was the big IT management fad of the late 90s (it dovetailed nicely with ISO9000 TQM) before XP and then Agile became popular.
In a sense, the problem with Adobe seems to me to be the alignment of organizational goals with user benefits, and not software process.
They did it with an almost insane level of attention to detail.
http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/06/writestuff.html
So it certainly is possible to do.