Absolute reliability of software is considered unattainable, because even when it is build following strict quality rules, software is not free of failure occurrences during its lifetime. Software s reliability level is related, among others, to the amount of remaining defects that will be exercised during its use. If software contains less remaining defects, it is expected that failures will occur less often, although many of these defects will never be exercised during its useful life. However, libraries and remote services of dubious quality are frequently used. In an attempt to enable software to check mistakes at runtime, hypothetically Lightweight Formal Methods, by means of executable assertions, can be effective and economically viable to ensure software s reliability both at test time as well as at run-time. The main objective of this research is to evaluate the effectiveness of executable assertions for the prevention and observation of run-time failures. Effectiveness was evaluated by means of experiments. We instrumented data structures with executable assertions, and subjected them to tests based on mutations. The results have shown that all non-equivalent mutants were detected by assertions, although several of them were not detected by tests using non-instrumented versions of the programs. Furthermore, estimates of the computational cost for the use of executable assertions are presented. Based on the infrastructure created for the experiments we propose an instrumentation policy using executable assertions to be used for testing and to safeguard run-time.