A Longitudinal Cohort Study on the Retainment of Test-Driven Development
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.
Cite
@article{arxiv.1807.02971,
title = {A Longitudinal Cohort Study on the Retainment of Test-Driven Development},
author = {Davide Fucci and Simone Romano and Maria Teresa Baldassarre and Danilo Caivano and Giuseppe Scanniello and Burak Thuran and Natalia Juristo},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1807.02971},
year = {2018}
}
Comments
ESEM, October 2018, Oulu, Finland