If there's one thing that engineer engineers have considered standard practice for ever and ever, but software engineers seem to still not entirely grok, it's destructive testing.

I see this a lot with performance measurement, for example. A team will run small-scale benchmarks, and then try to estimate how a system will scale by linearly extrapolating those results. I don't think I've ever seen it work out well in practice. Nothing scales linearly forever, and there's no reliable way to know when and how it will break down unless you actually push it to the point of breaking down.