context
An audio plugin, written in C++ on JUCE
A standalone distortion plugin with hard clipping, soft clipping, and half-wave rectification modes, plus a GUI with a real-time output meter.
testing
Integration testing meant loading it into FL Studio
DSP is the one place where a passing unit test tells you almost nothing. The maths can be correct and the result can still sound wrong — aliasing, a meter that lags the audio, gain staging that clips before your algorithm even runs.
So the real test loop was building the plugin, loading it into FL Studio, and listening. Slower than a test suite and the only signal that mattered.