For some reason, people never seem to think about highly relevant questions such as "What is the minimum amount of code required to fully implement feature X?" Sure, it's an impossible question to answer accurately (in most cases) but it's useful to think about because it puts you in the correct mindset; it's worthwhile to approximate.
On the other hand, a lot of people do think about all sorts of almost irrelevant stuff like formal verification.
The thing that bugs me about formal verification is the fact that it's extremely wasteful and pointless when you haven't even thought about the answer to the first question.
People wrongly assume that all code which engineers produce is good code and serves a worthwhile purpose. This is very wrong. Most coders invent unnecessary abstractions all the time which create more work.
A lot of work in software engineering adds negative value. Sometimes it adds both negative and positive value so it's hard to tell.