Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
chapter 3
Software development has problems—buggy games, blue screens of death, ran-
dom crashes, programs not responding; the problems are numerous. Architects
and civil engineers do not have these problems. The pyramids are doing pretty
well and they are nearly 3,000 years old. Once a building is put up it tends to stay
up, but humans have been putting up buildings for a lot longer than they have
been writing software.
In the last few years, lots of interestingly named new software development
methodologies have started to appear. These methodologies are an attempt to
improve the way software is created and the final quality of the product. In this
section, we'll look at some of the more useful methodologies that you can put in
your programmer's toolkit.
Pragmatic programming
is the ability to finish a program satisfactorily within a
desired timeframe. This works by first understanding what is expected of the
final program, then a basic bare bones version of the program is written as
quickly as possible. This barely functional version is changed until it reaches the
original requirements. Changes may be drastic and require rewriting of entire
sections of the program, but that's okay. The most important thing is that at all
times the program is basically functional.
Search WWH ::
Custom Search