Question: Have you ever made a big engineering mistake? If so, what were the impacts?

Giuseppe Cotugno answered on 2 Nov 2017:

Yes. People make mistakes, whether they are engineers, scientists or politicians and I did myself more than one engineering mistake.

The impacts differ depending of what you did wrong. If you introduced a bug (a malfunction) the testing team will (hopefully) capture it and ask me to fix it. If I designed a part of the software to be oversimple or overcomplicated, the code (the list of commands) will be difficult to change and understand and a colleague will have to restructure the whole thing. If I misunderstood what to do (the worse thing) either the testing team, or the project manager, will eventually find out and I will have to do the whole thing from the start delaying all the deadlines. In any case, software can always be changed, the earlier a mistake is found the faster (and cheaper) is to resolve a problem.

The worse thing that can happen is that the mistake get shipped to the customer in their product. A design mistake is difficult to be spotted, although is the worse kind of error you can do. Normally if the software crashed (suddenly terminates) or restarts very easily or is unstable it might be a symptom for a design mistake. The effect of bugs are under everyone’s eyes: security breaches on Windows (i.e. a bad guy downloading a software that spies which keys you press), Word shutting down with no warning losing your document or even something as simple as the impossibility of equipping your team of soldiers on a video game