Testing is a vital part of the software development lifecycle. It plays an important role in the continuous integration/continuous deployment (CI/CD) pipeline, enabling developers to release dependable, resilient, and secure software consistently. There are many types of testing and testing methodologies: end-to-end testing, dynamic testing, integration testing, and others. This article focuses on component testing and unit testing.

Productivity is a big topic. We all want to be more productive — and software developers in particular get put under the microscope. Interestingly, their work is also particularly difficult to measure and assess what “productive” even is. But we need to do it because we want developers to be more productive — and happier — because we want to achieve business goals together, better.

We recently partnered with GameCI to bridge the gap between CircleCI and the game development scene. This partnership brought forth the Unity orb, a reusable component of config you can plug into your CircleCI configuration file to build and test your Unity projects. For a while now, continuous integration and delivery have been part of the software development cookbook of several software houses and IT departments. However, this is often not the case in game development.

Continuous integration (CI) demands continous testing: shifting left helps prevent faulty code from spreading, which is one of the core aims of CI. Datadog’s new Azure DevOps extension enables you to seamlessly incorporate integration and end-to-end tests into existing CI/CD workflows on Azure Pipelines, a dedicated CI/CD service that automatically runs builds, performs tests, and deploys your services and applications via cloud-hosted pipelines.

Reliability is a critical concern for software delivery teams. Every second of lackluster performance or service interruption comes with high costs. The consequences can extend beyond just monetary expenses and have a huge impact on a company’s reputation. In a survey conducted in 2022, participants reported that over 60% of digital infrastructure failures resulted in losses of $100,000 or more.

At Vela Games, we use CircleCI for building Project-V, our new multiplayer online co-op (MOCO) game that fuses the teamplay and skill of a multiplayer online battle arena (MOBA) game with the adventure of a massively multiplayer online (MMO) dungeon run.

How do you treat software development failure? Do you take time to measure and learn from software failure? Or do you try to fix it quickly only after your customers complain about it? Failure can be an opportunity to learn and get better. So how can you measure and learn from software failure, and turn failure into at least a partially positive experience? Failure happens all the time, but if you're not measuring it, how do you know what you’re missing?