Unit tests in the gaming industry? ho ho ho
I've heard from people who work on games that the standards are far far worse than any other type of tech job. Basic stuff you would expect from a large project like a similar coding paradigm or even just tests in general are often absent from video game projects, especially the big budget ones. Part of this is because nobody is going to sue you or lose millions of dollars if a game crashes, but also because the origin of a lot of these companies is small informal college projects between random nerds.
I have realized this is the case
I'm a developer, workingexp from telecom and public service sectors mainly where testing is 3-6 layered(Unit-,system-,intigration-,performance-, acceptance- and smoke- test. Intigration, performance and smoke removed when small independent systems or small fixes).
To not even unittest most common scenarios is so unthinkable for me!
I understund there are not 6 levels or even 3!! But to not have even UT and ST is biting yourself!
Whitout even concidering production impact(legal, data cleanup, badwill, downtime etc), these effects is very bad for any dev-team:
- To never move forward. Iteration after iteration, you work on the same piece of code. Fixing the fix for for the fix for the fix for the error raised because a fix....
- 2 days QA today is a month in half a year. Probable with a worse result
- Niether as an indiviudal or as a team, you learn or grow without closing your work
- Expensive. Tested code is cheap code.
- With a good level of QA comes both refactoring and performance. At least to a degree.