Productivity of Test Driven Development: A Controlled Experiment with Professionals

With the growing interest for Extreme Programming, test driven development (TDD) has been increasingly investigated, and several experiments have been executed with the aim of understanding if and when it is preferable to the traditional practice of testing the code after having written it (named TAC in the paper). However, the research concerning TDD is at its beginning and the body of knowledge is largely immature. This paper discusses an experiment carried out within a Spanish software company with the aim of comparing productivity in TDD and TAC.

[1]  Marco Torchiano,et al.  On the effectiveness of the test-first approach to programming , 2005, IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering.

[2]  Matthias M. Müller,et al.  Experiment about test-first programming , 2002, IEE Proc. Softw..

[3]  Boby George,et al.  A structured experiment of test-driven development , 2004, Inf. Softw. Technol..

[4]  Tore Dybå,et al.  Conducting realistic experiments in software engineering , 2002, Proceedings International Symposium on Empirical Software Engineering.

[5]  T. Vidmar,et al.  Towards empirical evaluation of test-driven development in a university environment , 2003, The IEEE Region 8 EUROCON 2003. Computer as a Tool..

[6]  Kent L. Beck,et al.  Extreme programming explained - embrace change , 1990 .

[7]  James Miller,et al.  A prototype empirical evaluation of test driven development , 2004 .

[8]  Laurie A. Williams,et al.  Test-driven development as a defect-reduction practice , 2003, 14th International Symposium on Software Reliability Engineering, 2003. ISSRE 2003..