Keeping programmer-testing fresh

I recently had a runthrough of A Roiling Original which helped me a ton…I decided to go through all the rooms and TAKE ALL and see what would happen.

This was a big boost to me, and shockingly, I hadn’t done so for a while, or I missed one obvious item. Even though I was looking for relatively non-critical bugs, I was able to identify odd problem items with a test run that was not technically heavy. I wound up looking for other things too & adding details I always meant to. I need to try it with other commands.

Is there anything anyone else tries, in order to keep programmer-testing fresh? I mean, I have trouble once I slip into “OMG, I bet I have some bugs I want to fix before sending them to testers.” It makes testing more daunting than it should be. Testing should be about finding the really bad stuff before your testers do, so they have a chance to tell you what works, as well.

Juhana Leinonen’s extension for Inform helps with doing this automatically, for TAKE and other verbs. But I’m wondering if people have any other ways to shake up programmer-testing so you don’t get in ruts. I mean, there are always alternate routes through, but I’m wondering about tips, or rules of thumb, or extensions that make things easier. Because a lot of times I know it’s just tiresome to make sure I did X or Y right–it’s too easy to say “99% sure that works, now I need to move on, can’t check everything at all times.” Plus at some point, realizing and trying all the possibilities gets exhausting.

Now a programmer can and should always label areas that feel wobbly that you need to revisit. I think having one thematic thing to test a day (X ALL, TAKE ALL, look at hints every move, try all out of world actions) is a big help to make sure some work is done, but it needs to be nontrivial. Does anyone have any themes?

(I hope this is a general enough question for here. I’m mainly thinking of I7 but I’m curious about other systems.)