Thursday 15 June 2006

Testing game tools

Where I work we create software (tools and runtime libraries) for making games. We already have a lot of code and when we fix something or add a new feature it'd be great to be able to run some automated tests to check we haven't inadvertently broken something. We haven't practiced any form of test-driven development as of yet and as such we have a lot of code that's tightly coupled and has low cohesion. (These are bad, and here's why.)

Getting some unit tests in place would be a good start. My idea is that we'd start with tests for chunks of our low-level code (such as our maths and memory management libraries). When we come to submit some changes to our source control system (which is incidentally based on Perforce) we can perform custom actions. This would allow us to run a set of tests automatically before allowing the changes to make it off a developer's machine.

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