A Longitudinal Cohort Study on the Retainment of Test-Driven Development

July 09, 2018 · Declared Dead · 🏛 International Symposium on Empirical Software Engineering and Measurement

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Authors Davide Fucci, Simone Romano, Maria Teresa Baldassarre, Danilo Caivano, Giuseppe Scanniello, Burak Thuran, Natalia Juristo arXiv ID 1807.02971 Category cs.SE: Software Engineering Citations 25 Venue International Symposium on Empirical Software Engineering and Measurement Last Checked 4 months ago

Abstract

Background: Test-Driven Development (TDD) is an agile software development practice, which is claimed to boost both external quality of software products and developers' productivity. Aims: We want to study (i) the TDD effects on the external quality of software products as well as the developers' productivity, and (ii) the retainment of TDD over a period of five months. Method: We conducted a (quantitative) longitudinal cohort study with 30 third year undergraduate students in Computer Science at the University of Bari in Italy. Results: The use of TDD has a statistically significant effect neither on the external quality of software products nor on the developers' productivity. However, we observed that participants using TDD produced significantly more tests than those applying a non-TDD development process and that the retainment of TDD is particularly noticeable in the amount of tests written. Conclusions: Our results should encourage software companies to adopt TDD because who practices TDD tends to write more tests---having more tests can come in handy when testing software systems or localizing faults---and it seems that novice developers retain TDD.