Consider a production Laravel application that needs to use Integer and decimal casts. How should the developer approach the requirement, and what should be checked before releasing it?

Consider a production Laravel application that needs to use Integer and decimal casts. How should the developer approach the requirement, and what should be checked before releasing it? Assume the system receives real users, real data and concurrent requests. The correct approach is to identify where integer and decimal casts belongs, define its inputs and outputs, protect the boundary with validation and authorization where applicable, consider database and performance implications, and add automated tests for the expected behavior. Concept-specific reasoning: Numeric casts help keep application-level types consistent when database values are strings or decimal representations. A useful implementation pattern is: protected function casts(): array { return [ 'is_active' => 'boolean', 'settings' => 'array', ]; }