testing
The perils of bunch/bundle?
I had some discussion on Friday about static vs. dynamic typing (grass is always green, eh?), and our frequent use of the “dictionary with attribute-like notation” object came up (commonly called a “bunch” or “bundle”). A number of people were saying how bad/unsafe it is. Not convinced, I brought...
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Maya and PyCharm
Recently at work I had the opportunity of spending a day to get Maya and PyCharm working nicely. It took some tweaking but we're at a point now where we're totally happy with our Maya/Python integration.
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Python Singletons
In my opinion, good python libraries and frameworks should spend effort guiding you towards the ‘pit of success’, rather than trying to keep you from failing. They do this by spending most effort on things related to the critical path- clear interfaces, simple implementations, thorough documentation. Which is why...
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Is QA a good stepping stone?
I’ve always heard that it was difficult to move from QA into development (game design/programming/art/production). I thought this was smart- QA people should be there to be QA people, not doing a job only because they hope it would lead to something else. And at some companies, it works....
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PSA: It isn’t dark magic, it’s your anti-virus software
We’ve all had it- sometimes, under certain conditions, your code errors with an IOError because Windows can’t delete a file. It seems random, and it is. Well, in case you weren’t aware, it’s almost definitely your anti virus software (http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/archive/2012/09/07/10347136.aspx) or at least, some other crazy shit going on....
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Including test files in coverage reports
We’ve finally gotten our test coverage reports published to an accessible place and I’ve been wondering whether including test files as part of the coverage report is generally preferable to excluding them. Initially I thought they should be excluded- after all, it’s your ‘real’ code people are generally worried...
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TDD for legacy code, graphics code, and legacy graphics code?
We’re currently undergoing a push to do more ‘Agile testing’ at work. At CCP, we “do” Agile pretty well, but I don’t think we “code” Agile really well. A large part (the largest part?) of Agile coding and Agile testing is TDD/Unit Testing, of which I’m a huge fan...
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Why I hate Test Driven Development
I have no problem saying that I write good code. I place a focus on TDD and thorough unit and integration testing. I document everything I write (not just function documentation- I document classes, modules, and systems). The fact is, since I’ve been doing these two things somewhat religiously,...
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Don’t forget outsourcers!
In the comments on post “Internal Tools Only Require the Critical Path“, Robert Kist points out a few problems to think about when developing internal tools that may have to be used by outsourcers. I absolutely agree and writing outsource-compliant tools are something many TA’s (including myself) can struggle...
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“Refactor”
Refactoring is defined as a “disciplined technique for restructuring an existing body of code, altering its internal structure without changing its external behavior” by Martin Fowler. But its everyday usage takes a very different meaning. We use the word refactor to everything from the original meaning, to a complete...
