Editing Assertion (software development) (section)

=== Assertions during the development cycle ===

During the [[development cycle]], the programmer will typically run the program with assertions enabled. When an assertion failure occurs, the programmer is immediately notified of the problem. Many assertion implementations will also halt the program's execution: this is useful, since if the program continued to run after an assertion violation occurred, it might corrupt its state and make the cause of the problem more difficult to locate. Using the information provided by the assertion failure (such as the location of the failure and perhaps a [[stack trace]], or even the full program state if the environment supports [[core dump]]s or if the program is running in a [[debugger]]), the programmer can usually fix the problem. Thus assertions provide a very powerful tool in debugging.