Is unit test used in game development?

No, unit testing alone, or even in conjunction with token/minimal integration testing, is no where near “ok”. Not very common at all. You would need to write custom software to test every game and at that point you are writing double the code: the game, and the code to test the code.

What should unit tests be testing?

Unit tests should validate all of the details, the corner cases and boundary conditions, etc. Component, integration, UI, and functional tests should be used more sparingly, to validate the behavior of the APIs or application as a whole.

Are unit tests actually useful?

Unit tests are also especially useful when it comes to refactoring or re-writing a piece a code. If you have good unit tests coverage, you can refactor with confidence. Without unit tests, it is often hard to ensure the you didn’t break anything. In short – yes.

Should testers write unit tests?

tl;dr No, testers don’t write Unit Tests for code developed by developers, but some developers/testers write automated tests that are not Unit Tests. It depends on the definition of “Unit Test”. There is still a large number of people who call things that really aren’t Unit Tests “Unit Tests”.

What is unit testing and how it is done?

Unit testing is a software development process in which the smallest testable parts of an application, called units, are individually and independently scrutinized for proper operation. This testing methodology is done during the development process by the software developers and sometimes QA staff.

What is integration testing in games?

Integration testing is an area that is being adapted and enforced by various gaming jurisdictions. The objective of this is to ensure that games function correctly, and remain compliant even after they are integrated into the gaming operator’s environment.

Is unit testing hard?

As we can see, unit testing side-effecting methods could be as hard as unit testing non-deterministic ones, and may even be impossible. Any attempt will lead to problems similar to those we’ve already seen. The resulting test will be hard to implement, unreliable, potentially slow, and not-really-unit.

What should you not unit test?

Unit Testing – What not to test

• Do not test anything that does not involve logic. For example: If there is a method in the service layer which simply invokes another method in the data access layer, don’t test it.
• Do not test basic database operations.
• I don’t need to validate objects at all layers.

Why you shouldn’t write unit tests?

Normally, when the code isn’t written with unit tests in mind, it may be impossible to test some functions in complete isolation because they can have external dependencies. Their scope does not extend to testing side-effects or other integrations because that belongs to the domain of integration testing.

Are unit tests useful for game development?

Unit tests can be useful for a lot of the low level libraries you may use with game code but I seriously doubt it is of much use for the higher level stuff. Games are usually simulations and rely on massive amounts of shared state which can’t meaningfully be mocked up and tested in isolation.

Why are games so hard to test?

Games are usually simulations and rely on massive amounts of shared state which can’t meaningfully be mocked up and tested in isolation. Often functions in games do not return any sort of value that you can instantly check but instead set a process in motion which should complete at some point in the future.

Is it possible to unit test a function that changes state?

@Kai: Since the system’s state change is the side effectof the function, you’re still doing unit testing because the function is tested in isolation. It’s very easy to test with Mock Objects. I’m not sure why you’d claim that unit testing is somehow limited to inputs and outputs of proper functions.