Games from Within: Backwards Is Forward: Making Better Games with Test-Driven Development

One thing that should be clear and is important to stress is that TDD is not just writing unit tests. TDD is a development methodology, not a testing one. That’s why TDD’s benefits deal with better code design and structure, ease of refacto…

Good Article

GDC2006 Presentations Links

Game Developers Conference 2006 closed its doors last week. Soon or later most of the presentations will be published in the official site. While that comes, I will be posting here links to papers and presentations (only about programming) made public…

GDC -> Fun + Motivation

So after another trip to San Jose, I must say that the sessions were hit and miss.

Noel and I differ a bit on mocks. I use them quite a bit in the project I’m working on. I think part of the reason is that mocks are much easier to create in UnrealScript than in C++. Extracting an interface, renaming everything and worrying about virtual function overhead can put a damper on the whole process. Also, as Noel mentions, if you design your code to be horizontal you need them less.

The do make many tests much simpler and orthagonal

the bmock library is not published yet. In fact it was initially developed for internal use only, but then I realised it might be useful for a wider audience. I will try to put it somewhere at sourceforge when I come back from my recent business trip (in two weeks). If you want to take a look at its documentation gmail me a line using my first name, dot, last name as an address (a naive anti-spam measure).

Now with regard to your comment about mocks and flat object structure I think I see where does the argument lay. In OO we indeed have a best practices recommendation to avoid deep inheritance hierarchy since it typically leads to a very fragile and overcomplicated structure. I’m not sure it’s the same with regrad to an object composition structue, which could be quite deep. The very concept of cohesion and delegation assumes that every object concentrates on its own responsibilities and delegates the rest to other objects. So inter-object communication and thus a need for mocks is supposed to be a norm rather than an exception. Not useing mocks would lead to more complex tests and fixtures.

Asher

Agile game development

I’ve been looking at various software development methodologies lately and I’ve found some pretty interesting blogs on one type that is very exciting.

Bunch O’Links on agile/testing topics

Titus suggested I post some of the links I keep sending him, so here they are

Further Proof Agile is Turning the Corner

I love to find information that backs up my belief that agile development practices are gaining wider acceptance, such as this article describing how to do TDD game programming in C++.