assertion failure

When an assertion failure occurs, the programmer is immediately notified of the problem.

Assertion failures result in raising an when the program is run with the appropriate flags, without which the assert statements are ignored.

Since an assertion failure usually reports the code location, one can often pin-point the error without further debugging.

If an assertion evaluates to false at run-time, an assertion failure results, which typically causes execution to abort.

Using assertions as a general-purpose error handling mechanism is unwise: assertions do not allow for recovery from errors; an assertion failure will normally halt the program's execution abruptly.

As well as testing for outright crashes, fuzz testing is used to find bugs such as assertion failures and memory leaks (when coupled with a memory debugger).

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 dumps or if the program is running in a debugger), the programmer can usually fix the problem.