Games from Within

Mine is two seconds. For many months, our unit tests ran under one second. Each library has its own set of unit tests, and so does the game and each tool. So even though we were writing lots of unit tests, we weren't always running them all at the same time. There was a definite snappiness to coding: write test, compile, fail, write code, compile, pass, move on. Go, go, go.

It's no secret that I'm a big fan of unit tests. They provide a huge safety net for refactorings, double check the code logic, and prevent code rot. In addition, unit tests written through Test-Driven Development help define the architecture and keep programmers happy. They'll even catch a bug or two along the way, but if you rely on them as your only way to catch bugs, you're in for a surprise.

We grabbed the best features of each framework and created what we think it's the best C++ unit-testing framework out there (for our needs anyway). We took the results and put them up in Sourceforge under a veryunrestrictive license, and that's how UnitTest++ was born.

We have all experienced how development slows down to a crawl towards the end of a project. We have seen first-hand the difficulty of squashing insidious many-headed bugs. We have wrestled with somebody else's code, just to give up or fully re-write it in despair. We have sat in frustration, unable to do any work for several hours while the game build is broken. Code can get too complex for its own good. See how doing something so apparently backwards as writing unit tests before any code can help with all those problems.

At this point, we have been using CppUnitLite2 for a year at High Moon Studios doing test-driven development on Windows, Xbox 360, and some PS3. It has been used to unit test libraries of an engine, pipeline tools, GUI applications, and production game code.