...

/

Program for Fun vs. Program for Production

Program for Fun vs. Program for Production

Learn about one of the two approaches to achieve quality in software development: build it in from the beginning, or beat it in afterward.

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 ...