Making Mistakes Impossible!

Referring to the excellent book by James Shore, titled, THE ART OF AGILE DEVELOPMENT

There is a section where he says (page 166)

-         The best way to fix a process is to make mistakes impossible

-         He gives an example of UI field lengths, quite often they become inconsistent with database field lengths, this leads to bugs in the application

o  He suggests changing your design to base one value off the other

o  Alternatively, we could write a test to check all UI and database fields for consistency and run that test as part of every build

Have you solved similar problems differently? Would love to hear your views!!