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§24.6. Testing for thoroughness
The presence of actual bugs or defects is not the only thing we want to consider when testing a story. We may also want to check whether we have built the story with a consistent amount of depth.
Are there descriptions for everything the player might look at? If we've implemented special verbs, do they have appropriate reactions for all the different objects? If most objects in a story about restaurant reviewing have a special response to being tasted, for instance, it might be disappointing for the player to encounter late-added objects that don't.
Checking implementation thoroughness can be a laborious process, but there are a few things we can do to automate it. For instance, we might add to a not-for-release section a rule that checks for certain properties:
When play begins (this is the run property checks at the start of play rule):
repeat with item running through things:
if description of the item is "":
say "[item] has no description."
This will confront us with a reminder of what we still need to fill in every time we start up the story.
There are also some extensions that are designed to assist with this, notably the massive Object Response Tests by Juhana Leinonen. Object Response Tests allows us to try out a long list of commands against any object in the story, so that we can quickly identify ones with nonsensical replies.
