Software Engineering and Computer Games

2.4. The software lifecycle

Whether you’re working alone or working as part of a large team, there will be a plan of action for how to design, code, test, debug, and document the software. A plan like this is usually called a software lifecycle. In this next section we’ll discuss a couple of possible lifecyles and then describe an Inventor lifecycle to use for the kind of exploratory, time-constrained project that we’ll do in this book.

If you do not consciously choose a particular software lifecycle, you end up in fact using a scenario known as ‘code and fix.’ It means making no plan at all, but instead simply diving in, writing code, and trying to fix each new problem as it develops. Code and fix is considered one of the most inefficient ways ...