A selection of mistakes made in the acquisition and development of embedded systems

Despite the efforts spent in the recent years to create and establish the activity of generation and development of software as an engineering discipline, we are still far from this goal. The mainline effort centers around the attempts to create and enforce methodologies aimed at the various phases of hypothesised life cycles. Clearly, all the methodologies suggested and introduced are built upon the experience gained during the time, while the term `experience´ is most often associated with errors, mistakes and `burnt fingers´. The author presents a selection of such errors and mistakes, collected from actual experience with real projects. The motivation to present and expose these errors is based on the notion that `the wise are learning from the mistakes of others´