[MUD-Dev] Re: Analysis and specification - the dirty words of mud development?

[Bruce Mitchener]

JC Lawrence wrote:
> On Wed, 10 Jun 1998 12:05:18 -0700 
> Mike Sellers<mike at bignetwork.com> wrote:
> 
> > Testing is a lot less onerous if you've done solid design work in
> > advance.  :-)
> 
> Key questions:

All of my answers will be for the Genesis driver for Cold, and nothing at 
all to do with ColdCore, for which the answers to all these questions are 
'no' unfortunately.

>   Does anyone here have a base of regression tests for even any
> portion of their server or game code?

Genesis 1.2 is seeing the return of the old testing suite that Greg 
Hudson had back in the ColdMUD days.  The tests are functional in nature 
so far, testing out the various features of the language and the 
builtins, and soon the natives.  As bugs are reported in the 1.2 
development base, regression tests will be added for those.  This testing 
suite is helping out a lot as I look into making some larger changes in 
the driver and interpreter.

>   Does anyone here have a test plan for their server or game base?

No releases of Genesis 1.2 will be done unless they pass the test suite on 
the development platforms (Linux, FreeBSD, Solaris).

>   Does anyone here have actually do any structured or automated
> testing of their MUD or game code?

The test suite is fully automated in that you merely run a perl script, 
it runs the ColdC script and compares actual output with expected output 
and reports the differences.  This has also been integrated into the 
Makefile for Genesis, so that a 'make test' will run the tests.  As the 
test suite approaches more complete code coverage (at least of the 
language side of the driver), we'll run it under Purify also to confirm 
that no new memory problems have been injected into the code.

> I wouldn't be surprised if the answers to all three were a resournding
> "No!" on all counts (I'm an exception BTW Yes across the board, but
> that's expected).

Which is truly unfortunate.

--
Bruce Mitchener, Jr.
bruce at puremagic.com

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