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You prefaced this with "I can't document this" but the statement that "[software project failures] never happen when you have high code coverage" seems outlandish, I'm certain there are thousands of projects failing right now with 80%+ code coverage due to requirements documentation that doesn't match the user's expectations and developers writing trivial rather than intelligent unit tests.

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I've witnessed that a number of times -- at one company I worked with, we had a team of 30 people disabled even though all of the unit tests worked fine. Someone had inserted something into some shared code (that with even marginally competent engineering would not have shared) that rendered the entire application stack inoperable. I think it was a monkeypatch (Ruby on Rails), so it was VERY hard to detect.

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