The book by  focus on intelligent electronic device, Alan Cohen is a manager/system engineer, so the book will lean more towards a birds eye view that links different elements together.

Notes:

• Preface
  • P XI:
    • 95% of new products fail
    • Common mistake: not estimating effort correctly. [Remark: from my experience in both software, hardware it's the very exact things that happends with the scheduling and budgeting]
  • P XII:
    • System engineering is about integration
• CH1
  • P2:
    • Fundamental Principle: surprises only get more expensive if discovered later. Surprises are mostly bad [Remark: somehow look like mutation in DNA most of them are bad, that's why evolution takes aeons]
  • P3: 11 sins indication
    • 1 - Use agile process, test constantly, rather find problems eariler
    • 2,3 - Assumptions are bad, either by us specullating users or users preference
    • 4,5,6,7 - Management issues, need to be structured and address outside constrains
    • 8 - Wanting to add everything is bad [remark1: I actually always see students doing it even in online platform UX design, ending up with a lot of features which may confuse the users] [remark2: Reducing user-friendliness for being extensivly configurable might not be bad if it's not for normal users but for professional tools, eg: audio mixer,pilot's panel, in this case, I do not think this sin is that important as people who need it would adapt and they really need feature rich]
    • 9 - Always being perfectionist is bad
    • 10, 11 - Business strategy side, exit strategy and integration vs enabling technology [remark: for developing technology I think it's only this book's perspective that makes it bad, I do think there's space for technology development, having key technology in hand can raise bar for competetors so I do not think that's such a bad idea]