The depressing part is that these "modern practices" were essentially invented in the 1960s by defense and aerospace projects like the NTDS, LLRV/LLTV, and Digital Fly-by-Wire to produce safety-critical software, and the rest of the software industry simply ignored them until the last couple of decades.
Believe it or not, at least some of those modern practices (unit testing, CI, etc) do make a big (positive) difference there.