Things Engineers Like: Recreatable Problems

The purpose of engineering is create or improve solutions to problems that we may have. So the most critical thing is to know your problem or what you're trying to improve on is. It is essential to understand why you are engineering your product in the first place; many people overlook this aspect and can cause backlash in the future. The picture above illustrates a common problem that companies may face which can be avoided with planning and proper understanding of the problem (may be a repost of the picture but I really enjoy the image).

But sometimes you get problems that aren't easily or not reproducible. Unfortunately, these are not uncommon and take more time and effort to solve (which may or may not be imperative). I'm solve everyone has experienced one of these problem on their electronic devices especially computers; most of the time, a restart (sometimes a manual one) is the "work-around" for the problem and the user may never encounter the problem again. But as an engineer, it's your duty to support the product and try to figure out what happened and how it can be solved. Determining what caused the error may be an impossible task in which you can just say "it was just a glitch and should never happen again" or create a solution in which the problem (if it truly exists) can be avoided in all situations; this would be a business decision. 

Finding problems in software is frustrating but trying to recreate problems can be even more aggravating (especially when you have to click 2 pixels to the right of the third window and there's 25 more extremely detailed steps after to get to the problem). It is even worse when it's a hardware failure and not a software issue. I'm sure many engineers can sympathize with me!