Comment by im_down_w_otp

I think FMEAs are a very good procedural tool. Because they put you into a mindset of considering your system and its functionality that's more "failure first" oriented.

However, they're also very difficult and time consuming to perform and keep updated throughout the development lifecycle. They're also necessarily sparse in terms of real coverage of a system's operational/behavioral domain for complex systems.

That said, I think way more software engineering organizations should be doing them as a matter of course even outside safety-critical systems. They're a very useful procedural tool to highlight blindspots at the very least.