Article

An initial investigation of test driven development in industry

Authors:

Laurie WilliamsAuthors Info & Claims

SAC '03: Proceedings of the 2003 ACM symposium on Applied computing

Pages 1135 - 1139

https://doi.org/10.1145/952532.952753

Published: 09 March 2003 Publication History

Abstract

Test Driven Development (TDD) is a software development practice in which unit test cases are incrementally written prior to code implementation. In our research, we ran a set of structured experiments with 24 professional pair programmers. One group developed code using TDD while the other a waterfall-like approach. Both groups developed a small Java program. We found that the TDD developers produced higher quality code, which passed 18% more functional black box test cases. However, TDD developer pairs took 16% more time for development. A moderate correlation between time spent and the resulting quality was established upon analysis. It is conjectured that the resulting high quality of code written using the TDD practice may be due to the granularity of TDD, which may encourage more frequent and tighter verification and validation. Lastly, the programmers which followed a waterfall-like process often did not write the required automated test cases after completing their code, which might be indicative of the tendency among practitioners toward inadequate testing. This observation supports that TDD has the potential of increasing the level of testing in the industry as testing as an integral part of code development.

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Cited By

Lemos OSilveira FFerrari FSilva TGuerra EGarcia A(2024)Unraveling the code: an in-depth empirical study on the impact of development practices in auxiliary functions implementationSoftware Quality Journal10.1007/s11219-024-09682-432:3(1137-1174)Online publication date: 1-Sep-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1007/s11219-024-09682-4
Papis BGrochowski KSubzda KSijko K(2022)Experimental Evaluation of Test-Driven Development With Interns Working on a Real Industrial ProjectIEEE Transactions on Software Engineering10.1109/TSE.2020.302752248:5(1644-1664)Online publication date: 1-May-2022
https://doi.org/10.1109/TSE.2020.3027522
Taufiqurrahman FWidowati SAlibasa M(2022)The Impacts of Test Driven Development on Code Coverage2022 1st International Conference on Software Engineering and Information Technology (ICoSEIT)10.1109/ICoSEIT55604.2022.10030006(46-50)Online publication date: 22-Nov-2022
https://doi.org/10.1109/ICoSEIT55604.2022.10030006
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cover image ACM Conferences

SAC '03: Proceedings of the 2003 ACM symposium on Applied computing

March 2003

1268 pages

ISBN:1581136242

DOI:10.1145/952532

Conference Chair:
Gary B. Lamont
Air Force Institute of Technology
,
Program Chairs:
Hisham Haddad
Kennesaw State University
,
George A. Papadopoulos
University of Cyprus, Cyprus
,
Publications Chair:
Brajendra Panda
University of Arkansas

Copyright © 2003 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Published: 09 March 2003

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Florida, Melbourne

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Cited By

Lemos OSilveira FFerrari FSilva TGuerra EGarcia A(2024)Unraveling the code: an in-depth empirical study on the impact of development practices in auxiliary functions implementationSoftware Quality Journal10.1007/s11219-024-09682-432:3(1137-1174)Online publication date: 1-Sep-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1007/s11219-024-09682-4
Papis BGrochowski KSubzda KSijko K(2022)Experimental Evaluation of Test-Driven Development With Interns Working on a Real Industrial ProjectIEEE Transactions on Software Engineering10.1109/TSE.2020.302752248:5(1644-1664)Online publication date: 1-May-2022
https://doi.org/10.1109/TSE.2020.3027522
Taufiqurrahman FWidowati SAlibasa M(2022)The Impacts of Test Driven Development on Code Coverage2022 1st International Conference on Software Engineering and Information Technology (ICoSEIT)10.1109/ICoSEIT55604.2022.10030006(46-50)Online publication date: 22-Nov-2022
https://doi.org/10.1109/ICoSEIT55604.2022.10030006
Kowta AHarida PVenkatraman SDas SPriya V(2022)Cyber Security and the Internet of Things: Vulnerabilities, Threats, Intruders, and AttacksProceedings of International Conference on Computational Intelligence and Data Engineering10.1007/978-981-16-7182-1_31(387-401)Online publication date: 28-Feb-2022
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-7182-1_31
Akerele O(2018)System dynamics modelling of the impact of agile practice on the quality of continuous delivery projectsInnovations in Systems and Software Engineering10.1007/s11334-017-0296-z14:3(183-208)Online publication date: 1-Sep-2018
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1007/s11334-017-0296-z
Stefan PHorky VBulej LTuma PBinder WCortellessa VKoziolek ASmirni EPoess M(2017)Unit Testing Performance in Java ProjectsProceedings of the 8th ACM/SPEC on International Conference on Performance Engineering10.1145/3030207.3030226(401-412)Online publication date: 17-Apr-2017
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3030207.3030226
Tosun ADieste OFucci DVegas STurhan BErdogmus HSantos AOivo MToro KJarvinen JJuristo N(2017)An industry experiment on the effects of test-driven development on external quality and productivityEmpirical Software Engineering10.1007/s10664-016-9490-022:6(2763-2805)Online publication date: 1-Dec-2017
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1007/s10664-016-9490-0
Siles LSantos MRodrigues RFilho LSiles JMaria RMarques JDias LCunha A(2017)An Integrated Academic System Prototype Using Accidents and Crises Management as PBLInformation Technology - New Generations10.1007/978-3-319-54978-1_55(419-427)Online publication date: 18-Jul-2017
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-54978-1_55
Kayongo PChigona WMabhena Z(2016)Why do software developers practice test-driven development?2016 International Conference on Advances in Computing and Communication Engineering (ICACCE)10.1109/ICACCE.2016.8073775(357-361)Online publication date: Nov-2016
https://doi.org/10.1109/ICACCE.2016.8073775
Erdogmus HMelnik GJeffries R(2016)Test-Driven DevelopmentEncyclopedia of Software Engineering10.1081/E-ESE-120044180(1211-1229)Online publication date: 28-Jul-2016
https://doi.org/10.1081/E-ESE-120044180
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