Program for Fun vs. Program for Production

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 bugs would crash Windows 95 long before 49.7 days could pass.

We can take one of the two approaches to quality: build it in from the beginning, or beat it in afterward. The former approach requires a lot of discipline in our day-to-day coding. The latter requires a lot of testing and, in the end, a lot of work after we may have thought we were done.