Determining How Much Defensive Programming to Leave in Production Code
One of the paradoxes of defensive programming is that during development, you'd like an error to be noticeable—you'd rather have it be obnoxious than risk overlooking it. But during production, you'd rather have the error be as unobtrusive as possible, to have the program recover or fail gracefully. Here are some guidelines for deciding which defensive programming tools to leave in your production code and which to leave out:
Leave in code that checks for important errors. Decide which areas of the program can afford to have undetected errors and which areas cannot. For example, if you were writing a spreadsheet program, you could afford to have undetected errors in the screen-update ...
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