Making Robust Programs

Making Robust Programs

1. Defensive Design

   • Input Sanitisation
     • Removing any unwanted data or characters from user input
   • Input Validation
     • Checking to see if data meets a set of requirements before passing it to the program
   • Authentication
     • For helping to identify a user before allowing them to access pieces of data or features in the program. This can be done using passwords.
       • Another method of authentication is to force the user to choose a strong password

2. Maintainability

   • Comments
     • They help other programmers understand what the code is doing or what it is designed to do
   • Indentation
     • Helps programmers to see which parts of the code fall under each statement

3. The purpose of testing

   • To see if a program meets its intended requirements and to spot different errors (mainly logic errors)
   • Types of testing
     • Iterative Testing
       • Where the programmer tests each element as they are coding it, continuously until the feature meets all logical requirements
     • Final/Terminal Testing
       • When the programmer tests their entire program to check that all features are working

4. How to spot errors

   • Syntax Errors
     • - Check your spelling - Check you are using the correct symbols
     • If your code editor has error maintenance or syntax checking, use that.