Game Debugging And Testing

by West, Mick

• ISBN13: 9781584504894
• ISBN10: 1584504897
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2006-10-15
• Publisher: Charles River Media

Summary

Game Debugging and Testing is an essential troubleshooting guide for programmers, testers, scripters, and producers tasked with debugging and testing games. It teaches the procedures for debugging and testing during the game development process. Using this book will help developers create a solid plan for testing and debugging that will prevent costly mistakes and help save money. The book provides a detailed look at the types of bugs and problems that are specific to game development, and each chapter is geared toward a particular type of bug. In the first part of the book bugs are defined and the life cycle of a bug is followed, from testing and initial detection, to description of the symptoms, and finding a solid repeat procedure. A detailed look at the process of tracking down the root cause of the symptoms and fixing the bug is provided, along with the process for testing the fix and verifying that it handles all the symptoms of the bug. The second part of the book deals with specific tools and techniques that are used by the engineering and test departments, and the final part of the book focuses on specific problems, including details on how to test for these problems, how to track them down, and how to fix and verify them. To streamline development, the book also explores how best to structure the interactions between the three main departments involved: testing, engineering, and production. The focus throughout is on debugging games with the technologies most common to modern game developers and C/C++ is the primary code used for the full game application on the CD-ROM.

Table of Contents

Part 1 ? The Testing and Debugging Cycle: Ch. 1 Introduction and Definitions; Ch. 2 The Unique Problems of Debugging Games; Ch. 3 The Causes of Bugs; Ch. 4 Techniques for Bug Prevention (Solid Code); Ch. 5 Bug Detection (Testing: Coverage, Fault Injection, Scripts); Ch. 6 Bug Reporting (Communication); Ch. 7 Finding the Cause (Investigation); Ch. 8 Bug Fixing (remediation); Ch. 9 Fix Testing (Does the Fix Do What it is Supposed to Do?); Ch. 10 Fix Verification (Is it Gone?) Part 2 ? Tools and Techniques: Ch. 11 Debuggers; Ch.12 Loggers and Code Instrumentation; Ch. 13 Asserts; Ch.14 Code Analyzers; Ch. 15 Profilers, Performance Analyzers and ICE; Ch. 16 Visual Debugging; Ch.17 Debugging by Thinking; Ch.18 Revision Control; Ch. 19 Bug Databases; Ch. 20 Debugging Middleware; Ch. 21 Debugging Legacy Code; Ch. 22 Debugging Without the Source Code: Part 3 ? Types of Bugs & How to Handle Them; Ch. 24 Crash Bugs; Ch. 25 Memory Corruption; Ch. 26 Memory Leaks and Fragmentation; Ch. 27 Logic Bugs; Ch. 28 Unhandled Errors; Ch. 29 Performance Bugs; Ch. 30 Asynchronous Bugs; Ch. 31 Rendering Bugs; Ch. 32 Math Bugs; Ch. 33 Collision Bugs; Ch. 34 Physics Bugs; Ch. 35 Player Control Bugs; Ch. 36 AI Bugs; Ch. 37 Network Bugs; About the CD-ROM; Index