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I see — your experience suggests that rules inevitably get turned into thoughtlessly evaluated metrics that then get gamed.

It is a shame when that happens, but when it does, it's not the fault of the rules, it's the fault of the organizational culture. The rules would still be valuable if you used them thoughtfully and with the aim of improving the reliability of the product, not gaming some management system.

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I don't think they're intentionally gamed, it's just part of human nature. If you don't have to defend your assertions (because more assertions is presumed better, as per the rules), then people are liable to err on the side of putting more in that they need to.

With the exception of assert(ptr != NULL) assertions, I think most of the ones I've hit have actually been completely duff, and with some thought could just be removed. I dread to think what would happen if I grepped the commit histories of all the projects I've worked on for "removed duff assert".

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