Assert a good practice or not?

Question

Is it a good practice to use Assert for function parameters to enforce their validity. I was going through the source code of Spring Framework and I noticed that they use

Answer 1

I'm keeping my assertions in released binaries but with modified behavior: abort is not called but stacktrace is collected.

More details here: http://blog.aplikacja.info/2011/10/assert-to-abort-or-not-to-abort-thats-the-question/