I have some friends in game dev who have shipped some pretty big titles (and still do). They have very similar sentiments with regards to constant self-inflicted breakages and (lack of) testing and code reviews as well.
It’s given me an appreciation for the kind of code quality everybody just naturally agreed on and did back when I worked at a FAANG. Nobody needed to be convinced to write/maintain tests for their change, or be told to keep the mainline branch building cleanly.
I wonder if any of the large studios out there today have a culture of testing and reviews?
Reviews are fairly common but unit tests not so much, in my experience. CI is commonplace in all but the smallest studios, and automated testing (such as running the game after building and performing checks) is quite common; some productions use bots to simulate players.
It varies by company and project and also the stage of development. Avalanche sounds particularly chaotic though.
It’s given me an appreciation for the kind of code quality everybody just naturally agreed on and did back when I worked at a FAANG. Nobody needed to be convinced to write/maintain tests for their change, or be told to keep the mainline branch building cleanly.
I wonder if any of the large studios out there today have a culture of testing and reviews?