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Effectiveness of TDD Whitepaper

Jeffrey Palermo links to a whitepaper from the NCSU Computer Science Department titled "An Initial Investigation of Test Driven Development in Industry". There is some very good information here as it builds on an earlier study from Muller & Hagner's work in "Experiment about test-first programming."

Published May 24 2005, 08:15 AM by shebert

Comments

Brendan Tompkins said:

From the study's conclusions:

"TDD approach appears to yield code with superior external code quality, as measured by conformance to a set of black box test cases when compared with code developed with a more traditional waterfall-like model practice."

This is an awesome finding and should be broadcast loud an clear across the land!

# May 24, 2005 10:00 AM

shebert said:

I also thought it was interesting that in 4.1.2 - they said the TDD pairs took approximately 16% more time to develop the codeset. However in 3.2, they state that only one control group "actually wrote any worthwhile automated test cases despite the fact they were specifically instructed to do so".

When one group throws away requirements it's hard to compare time-frames. But as they stated - "the control group may more accurately represent the state-of-the-practice of the software development industry."

# May 25, 2005 8:22 AM