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Defensive Design Techniques

The purpose of defensive design is make sure, as far as possible, that a program runs correctly and continues to run no matter what actions a user takes. Planning for all possibilities (contingencies) is important as well as thinking about what a user may do that the program does not expect.

Defensive design encompasses three areas:

  • protection against unexpected user inputs or actions, such as a user entering a letter where a number was expected
  • maintainability - ensuring code is readable and understandable
  • minimising/removing bugs

This anticipation and protection is done through:

  • validation
  • sanitisation
  • authentication
  • maintenance
  • testing

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Additional Reading

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defensive_design

https://www.bbc.co.uk/bitesize/guides/z4cg4qt/revision/1

www.teachyourselfpython.com