I was an EE undergrad. The formative project for me was a competition to see who could make the fastest digitally controlled maze solving robot.

The key that gave my team an advantage was the humble ASSERT. If the robot got off track, it would stop in place, blink a light, and show a line number on a digital display.

I've been working in and around Windows for a long time, and I'd say asserts and crash dumps are the two things that allow us to improve our quality given that we're still mostly using C/C++.