Therefore there are usually additional sets of tests developed to complement the developer tests. It is worth notating that these tests are usually not as thorough as full-functionality tests, and as it is the developers who are writing their own tests they sometimes suffer from blind spots in their testing. This means that not only do you have ready to use regression tests at the end, but the practice generally improves code quality, helps developers focus on satisfying the requirements from the interface point of view rather than from the perspective of implementation alone, and it encourages very short development cycles which increase productivity. The idea is that when you start to implement or improve a feature you first create a test that checks for the most fundamental aspect of the feature, then you write the feature code to satisfy that test, then you improve the test to check for the next requirement of the feature, and repeat. From the late ‘90s until up until today a process called Test-driven development (TDD), puts tests at the heart of all development. Various forms of automated testing have been popular in software development for decades. In a large project, that releases updates regularly, you can run thousands of these tests, called regression tests, to make sure your recent changes haven’t broken anything in the existing software. Instead, you can just click a button and let your computer (or the build system) test all your code several orders of magnitude faster than you can. The most obvious benefit of them is that, in theory, you no longer have to manually test this specific piece of software that you developed. Why Automated Testing?Īn automated test is a segment of code that checks a particular piece of software is behaving as expected. We will specifically be using the Unreal Engine which has been used for major games like Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order, Final Fantasy 7 Remake, Ark: Survival Evolved, Fortnite, and many more, as well as thousands of indie games. In this article, we will focus on the automated testing segment of the continuous integration pipeline, which is arguably the core part of the practice that will yield the most benefits. In the case of CI/CD, however, the potential benefits could significantly improve many of the worse problems that have plagued the games industry for decades - specifically, reducing the number and impact of bugs, minimizing crunch overtime, always having a build ready to show investors, and being able to act on player feedback much more quickly. This means that what might work well for most software fields, may not make sense in the gaming industry. Some of this resistance to new practices is well-founded as game development has very unique components, such as a more iterative process, a much larger amount of binary assets, and, generally, a more complex codebase than most traditional software development areas. The games industry, however, is dragging its feet on this, as it tends to do in the adoption of new development practices. In the last few years we have seen much of the software development world embracing the new practices of continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD), and, as an essential part of that, a new focus on automated testing.
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