Ron Jeffries <ronjeffries / REMOVEacm.org> wrote:

>On Sat, 15 Dec 2001 05:28:53 GMT, "Daniel T." <notdanielt3 / gte.net>
>wrote:
>
>>Unfortunatly, I write video games for 5 year olds for a living. The only 
>>thing that's important is the GUI... Why test the stuff that doesn't 
>>matter?
>
>Possibly Daniel T overstates his case. Certainly GUIs are important in
>video games, and certainly they are hard to test.

I may very well be overstating my case just to make a point. Isn't that
what makes newsgroups so lively? :-)

>But I always hated it when the "ball" went right through the "paddle"
>in Pong, and I hate it when I go into a room and can't pick up an
>object that is there.

In the first case, your talking about collision detection. No automated
test can be devised for that, a person has to look at the screen and
decide if the ball should have changed directions, or continued on its
course.

In the second, the computer doesn't know an item is there unless the
programmer told it, and the programmer doesn't know someone wants to
pick it up until a tester tries... Now you might say that we can make
automated tests to ensure that the user can pick up things that the
programmer told it was "gettable", but making sure that works is
trivial, so what is the point of writing a test for it?

>For a game to be good, everything has to work. A lot of that is GUI,
>and -- as I'm sure Daniel T knows quite well -- a lot of it isn't.

I'm going through one of my cynical phases again, we are doing a Disney
product and we spent the last month making the games easier because
Disney said they were too hard, and now we are having to work over-time
in the last week of the project to make them harder because now they
are too easy...


On the other hand, the concept that test-first programming has nothing
to do with testing and everything to do with interface design sounds
interesting.