I was half watching some movie; I don’t recall what it was. There was a father and son chat going on regurgitating the usual cliches, “you have to live your own life,” “you only have one life to live,” or something like that. It got me thinking about the different way we live our lives in the real and virtual worlds.
Category: video games
Reading an entry on James Bach’s blog reminded me of the best tester I ever worked with. It got me thinking about how he did it.
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Avoiding timing defects
My recent study of the defects that slipped through reviews but were found during testing show an interesting pattern: they were almost all due to timing issues. Could a change of programming style reduce those errors?
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On PSP and code reviews
Since reading about the PSP, I have continued to collect statistics. However, last week I decided to collect additional statistics related the the practice of reviewing code before compilation. The goal of this practice is to catch 100% of your compile errors before compilation by reading through the code. I was unsure about the wisdom of putting this responsibility on the programmer so I decided to gather some statistics to see if that doubt was justified.
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Progress quest
A comment on digg about an article on the lack of role playing in the modern RPG led me to this great little indie game.
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No security through stupidity
To twist the words of W. A. Wulf: more resources are wasted in the name of security (without achieving it) than for any other reason, including stupidity.
It occurred to me the other day that video game characters run everywhere. I remember being chided by Lara Croft about that once. On the other hand it’s amazing how much time we waste each year doing routine tasks.
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QoL and SPI: battle of the ROI’s
Jason Della Rocca has an article on the Escapist about investing in game developers and SPI (software process improvement.) As a game developer, I have no problem with the first part of this argument :) but the second is a minefield. SPI is too big a subject to fully cover in a single blog entry or article, but I will jot down a few thoughts raised by this issue.