The Impact of Test Driven Development on the Evolution of a Reusable Framework of Components – An Industrial Case Study

Abstract

Test Driven Development (TDD) is a software engineering technique to promote fast feedback, taskoriented development, improved quality assurance and more comprehensible low-level software design. Benefits have been shown for non-reusable software development in terms of improved quality (e.g. lower defect density). We have carried out an empirical study of a framework of reusable components, to see whether these benefits can be shown for reusable components. The framework is used in building new applications and provides services to these applications during runtime. The three first versions of this framework were developed using traditional test-last development, while for the two latest versions TDD was used. Our results show benefits in terms of reduced mean defect density (35.86%), when using TDD, over two releases. Mean change density was 76.19% lower for TDD than for test-last development. Finally, the change distribution for the TDD approach was 33.3% perfective, 5.6% adaptive and 61.1% preventive.

The Effects of Test-Driven Development on External Quality and Productivity: A Meta-Analysis

“…As only one of the effect sizes refers to an experiment conducted in an industrial context, only the experiments from the Academic subgroup lend themselves to the standardized analysis, which results in the summary effect size of À0:049. Nevertheless, it is interesting to note that the sole industrial experiment by Slyngstad et al [63] reported a contrasting effect size of 0.309. Due to only a single industrial experiment being included in the standardized analysis, the Level 1 summary value of the Academic subgroup is not very different from the Level 0 summary value of À0:010.…”

“…Therefore, the analysis is most sensitive to, or is most effected by, the inclusion of these two experiments. Also, with the exclusion of the sole industrial study by Slyngstad et al [63], the one-study removed plot shows that the overall effect size of the 10 academic studies is approximately zero. A more detailed comparison between the effect sizes from academic and industrial studies is presented later on in the subgroup analyses.…”

Test-Driven Development - Suggestions for Curriculum Development

“…Several authors have reported that TDD is the most difficult task among the other eXtreme Programming practices [14][35] [22][36] [37]. Experienced master's level students have been reported to have difficulties with TDD [18][38] and learnign may not be easy even for experienced professional in industry [39].…”

ComTest

“…Several studies employing XP methodology in software engineering courses have discovered TDD as the most difficult XP practice [19] [22] [12]. The difficulties have been similarly encountered by master's level students [14] and even the experienced professionals [21]. The difficulty of learning TDD arises from the demand to handle several different skills, such as test writing, testing tools, and refactoring [18].…”