Day 88

Weapon unit tests: COMPLETED!
Minibuilder: COMPLETED!

That's the real content for today. The rest will be a love letter to unit testing.

Yesterday when I made the game run on windows, I had to tweak the XML handling - apparently on whatever version of ruby I'm running over there, attributes you give to XML bits aren't automatically made into strings like they are on my linux box. So I changed it to explicitly use to_s.

That worked fine until today, when I finished up the weapon unit tests. I ran the suite (I have a script that runs all of them) and found out that it failed, which wasn't a surprise until I discovered that it wasn't the weapons failing at all! It was older code that had broken with the above change. Turns out nil.to_s is '', and '' gets read back in as an empty string, which for my purposes is vastly different than nil. I solved this by having it only set non-nil attributes in the XML to begin with, but the point is I never would have found it until it bit me on the ass in unpredictable ways if not for testing.

But finding obscure places where I've broken my code isn't their only purpose! After finishing the weapons tests, I went back to the minibuilder (also done today!) and fleshed out the functionality. Removing was enabled, and I found it worked pretty much how I expected and how the tests predicted it would, except in one case: I couldn't remove secondary weapons.

I went back to the test cases to find that I'd never written a test for that! I did so and delighted to see that it failed. Found the problem, patched it up. In this case I would probably have tracked down the bug without the tests just fine, but now I'll be alerted if it ever happens again.

P.S. I like you, unit testing, do you like me?

43 tests, 140 assertions, 0 failures, 0 errors

I'm not hearing a no.... :)