[MUD-Dev] software engineer: testing (was: [DGN] Creating a MUD)

[Bruce Mitchener]

David Bennett wrote:

> It can and does already.  If you properly follow software
> engineering practices you end up with significantly more reliable
> code, this is mostly for large projects though.  Motorola, IBM and

> For small single person projects it is not worth it (I think
> anyway, there is always some benifit in writing down and fleshing
> out your ideas).  However for large projects software engineering
> ends up saving you time and money in post production defect
> fixing.

If you take the line of reasoning that a lot of stuff that should be
common sense is allowed to fall into software engineering, then we
can include things like software testing. :)

And ... software testing should be done on all projects, large and
small.  Previously, most of the tools that I've liked using were
fairly expensive (Purify, Quantify), but lately, some pretty nice
free or cheaper equivalents have come along.

For Purify-like stuff, Valgrind is pretty nice (and GPL), but for
x86 Linux only.  Valgrind does most of what Purify does, but without
the UI. But it can also simulate the instruction and data cache and
give you back profiling data (function breakdown or line-by-line
source annotation) about what your hit/miss read/write rates looked
like.

   http://developer.kde.org/~sewardj/

OProfile is a whole-system profiler for Linux.  It'll let you know
where your system is spending its time as a whole.  When you're
running a suite of programs rather than a single monolithic app,
this is pretty useful.  Also nice when you want to get back info on
what the kernel is doing.

   http://oprofile.sourceforge.net/

Intel has also released an updated VTune that can do profiling data
collection on x86 Linux (and still needs the Win32 GUI for data
analysis).  VTune is probably one of the most enjoyable profilers
that I've used for verifying that things *were* working the way that
I thought they were and within the performance characteristics that
I was expecting.  It isn't free but the price isn't bad at all for
what it does.

   http://www.intel.com/software/products/vtune/vtune60/index.htm

I'd love to hear about other tools that people are using gainfully
to better test, debug, and analyze their software.  What cool things
am I missing out on?  (I'm interested in tools on other platforms as
well, I work on Mac OS X, Solaris and Windows as well, but most of
the free tools that I've found are for Linux.)

  - Bruce

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