The way the article describes Notch's testing methods sounds like a glaring anti-pattern. This reminds me of my first QA job... Thankfully another post in here suggests that he actually takes pains to mold the level design, etc, to make the game more easily testable.
For those who didn't RTFA, though because this isn't Slashdot there shouldn't be any, Notch is reputed to have given some segment of his game a complete replay every time he made a change though it isn't mentioned exactly how often this is or how big the change is. A note is made that his build scripts make this almost instantaneous.
This is a problem because manual testing takes forever and causes tester fatigue. You stop doing a good job.
It can be harder to test behavior in a 3D game than a text filtering app but imho a good design is a testable one. (This does not necessarily mean I'm that good of a designer yet...)
For those who didn't RTFA, though because this isn't Slashdot there shouldn't be any, Notch is reputed to have given some segment of his game a complete replay every time he made a change though it isn't mentioned exactly how often this is or how big the change is. A note is made that his build scripts make this almost instantaneous.
This is a problem because manual testing takes forever and causes tester fatigue. You stop doing a good job.
It can be harder to test behavior in a 3D game than a text filtering app but imho a good design is a testable one. (This does not necessarily mean I'm that good of a designer yet...)
Automate, automate, automate.