Skip to main content
Software Engineering

You are not logged in. Your edit will be placed in a queue until it is peer reviewed.

We welcome edits that make the post easier to understand and more valuable for readers. Because community members review edits, please try to make the post substantially better than how you found it, for example, by fixing grammar or adding additional resources and hyperlinks.

5
  • 9
    The trouble is, without unit tests how do you know that your merciless refactoring results in code which does the same thing? In my experience, I've found that depending on the problem it can take me less time to write tests+code than it does to write the code on it's own! The reason mainly boils down to the fact that for some problems I can try out a re-factor and retest automatically much quicker than I could test it manually, which can increase the velocity of iterations quite significantly. Commented Aug 4, 2011 at 12:21
  • 7
    For games, very often the results can be seen. If they can be seen, and appear good enough, they will be accepted, since a game is intended to be a subjective experience anyway. On the other hand, taking eg. Diablo 2 as an example, the number of errors in combat formulae showed where TDD would have brought huge value and saved them vast amounts of work on patches. For very well-defined problems such as solving equations, and where these cannot be judged by visual outputs at runtime, TDD is a must-have to ensure correctness. But that is a small fraction of the code in most games. Commented Aug 4, 2011 at 12:27
  • Also worth mentioning that due to the rate at which simulations run, it is better to be watching variables in real-time, onscreen, as the sim runs, than to sit with million-line logfiles to look through post the fact. Commented Aug 4, 2011 at 12:29
  • 3
    Unit tests make refactoring much easier, in my experience. Commented Aug 4, 2011 at 14:34
  • 1
    @Nick The big problem in gaming industry are the deadlines, which are always - "we had to deliver half a year ago". I think the time plays against unit-tests in time constrained environments. In some cases it's not a correct decision, but in most cases shipping without test writing is faster. Depends, really depends... Commented Aug 8, 2011 at 21:53