Since I started my programming in PHP and have rarely ventured into c, I cannot even begin to fathom what game development is like. However, I tend to regard the advanced game programmers as some of the best around. But as games tend to turn into bigger, multi-million dollar projects spanning several years, they also tend to be fairly buggy upon release. Unfortunately, it seems like that game development is still pretty chaotic with rushed deadlines and midnight bug fixes.

Just out of curiosity, I went looking for source code to see for myself. The only source I could find for a major game was for "the quake series":http://www.idsoftware.com/business/techdownloads/. Check this out (from Quake 2):

How cool would it be to write code about "monsters walking their beat" at your day job? Alas, I couldn't find any obvious test suites in the code. Maybe it's all just play testing? Yikes.

There is hope though:

Tim Willits: Absolutely. One of the things we've done is we've changed our production pipeline. We're trying to do more agile development. We've organized milestones into scrums, and people who develop games are familiar with scrums. For example, the guys working on the race stuff get together, they scrum, then we have a race. It may not be pretty, but we're working on physics and throttle response and suspension - I've learned so much about that stuff, I can't even tell you [laughs]. Then for the guys working on the first person stuff, we made competitions for accuracy, shots, time. That's stuff that's not in the game - like our headshot time mode - but we put it in as an internal competition for these sprints to the milestone. Sometimes you work on a game for two years, and it's just drudge, drudge, drudge, and even if the programmers just hack some rules in to make it fun to play, it really brings the spirit up for the team. -- "Tim Willits on Rage":http://www.shacknews.com/featuredarticle.x?id=519&page=2

There's only a few paragraphs about their development process in the interview, but I'd love to hear more.