First of all let me get an announcement out of the way:
New DPnP pages have been added to the site with screenshots of the Campaign Resource Manager. Here are the links:
So testing is rolling and so you may be wondering what is going on and how is it going overall? Some of you may not even be asking the question as you consider testing to be little more than using the product until something doesn’t work. You would be partially right. We are testing it in normal operation, but we are also testing with a few people who are deliberately trying to break the software. Are they succeeding?
The short is that while they have found a bug here or there, the bugs are fairly minor and easily fixed. I really only have a short bug list left to fix, and some of those bugs were created through solving others. I have some extra features going in, but overall if testing continues in this vein we could possibly release this before next year.
So how do we test a computer program? Well, the first thing I did was release it without documentation. I wanted to simulate those people out there that download a new program and expect it to be easy to use. So far, I have got exactly zero “How do I do this?” questions.
Another thing we attempt to try to actually bypass rules that are coded in. For instance, not allowing entries to share names within their element types. In general, you can tell they work as intended. However, through some testing we found hidden instances where the rules were broken. They we hard to find. For instance, attempting to create a duplicate skill did not work. Yet, somehow, it created a duplicated item. These things were weird at first but then I found the pattern in the code that allowed for these and fixed them.
Other bugs were simply some syntax stuff that result in some formatting issues in reports. These are being corrected.
After that we look for the features. Some features were obvious from outside the project. When asked for these features I wanted to slap myself for not thinking of them by myself. However, this is why you have testing. When it comes to a project like this you tend to overlook some of the more obvious choices because you are focused on a technical issue.
There are occasionally preference issues that I can really do nothing about. If one person wants something a certain way it can’t always happen. Sometimes a thing is the way it is for a purpose. I still encourage the dialogue because in many cases I have found a way to alter something for a single person that had little, if any, overal effect.
So today I am going to work on the last few features. I am hoping to have the Modern Sagas functionality done by the end of the week. However, today I am just going to finish content creation.
Until next time, have a Happy Christmas, or Hanuka, or whatever you celebrate. And Happy Gaming!
