Program for Fun vs. Program for Production
Understand the key differences between casual programming and production-quality development. Explore why discipline, thorough testing, and anticipating edge cases are crucial to building maintainable software that meets customer expectations. Develop insights into building confidence in your code's quality from the start to avoid costly fixes later.
We'll cover the following...
Discipline vs. testing in the code
When we program for fun, it is easy to skimp on handling edge cases, error reporting, and so forth. It is a pain. However, we cannot take these shortcuts when we program for production—not to mention a paycheck.
Production-quality code seems like a straightforward goal, but our industry had a heck of a time figuring out how to get it right. Windows 95, for example, had a bug that would hang the OS after 49.7 days of continuous operation. This would not be surprising except that this bug took four years to discover because other ...