I have been reading through some of the academic literature on TDD and figured it might be useful to put up a quick little bibliography of what I am reading through.
White paper on Unit Testing R.Venkat Rajendran http://www.mobilein.com/WhitePaperonUnitTesting.pdf
Realizing quality improvement through test driven development http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/esm/nagappan_tdd.pdf
Actually quite a few here http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/esm/
Efficiency and Effectiveness Measures To Help Guide the Business of Software Testing http://www.scribd.com/doc/2060575/1999-BenchmarkQA-Whitepaper-Efficiency-and-Effectiveness-Measures-To-Help-Guide-the-Business-of-Software-Testing
Effective Unit Test Minimization http://se.ethz.ch/people/leitner/publications/min_leitner_ase_2007.pdf
On the Effectiveness of the Test-First Approach to Programming
Test-Driven Development- Concepts, Taxonomy, and Future Direction
A structured experiment of test-driven development
Idea Paper v.02 – An Analysis of Test-Driven Development
Quite a few here http://collaboration.csc.ncsu.edu/laurie/publications.html#Testing
Have some more important things to read through put them up!
The link concerning “On the Effectiveness of the Test-First Approach to Programming” doesn’t work for me. Unable to find the document you mention.
Thanks for the response, although I did notice that pretty much all those papers also cover TDD. Getting my department head to agree to Unit Tests is one thing, getting them to agree to TDD is another.
My belief is that TAD is better than no testing at all, so I’ll take what I can get.
To be honest, the best link could have been the Idea Paper, but it appears that the controlled test never happened. That would be have been perfect for what I was looking for. In the mean time 15%-30% cost up front to reduce bugs by 40%-90% will have to be good enough. I guess I’ll see how the bean counters feel about it.
Thanks again for the links, they’ve been very helpful.
Steve, there are numbers in a few of those papers in particular “On the effectiveness ” … the quantify subjectively a 15-35% initial cost over no tests but show a direct correlation between number of tests and number of defects.
The big problem I’ve found with Unit Testing is that it’s hard for to quantify it’s ROI. When asked if it’ll increase the coding time, the answer is most definitely yes (although I think the numbers thrown around like 50% increase are miles too high). Most managers don’t even hear the “but it’ll save us time down the road” since all they’re too focused on the first part.
If anyone has any links out there re: the benefits of Unit Testing that has numbers it’d be much appreciated if you could post them.
A few of these links do that, but I was hoping for more.
Thanks in advance
There are quite a few on PSU’s CiteSeer also worth mentioning:
http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/search?q=Test+Driven+Development&submit=Search&sort=rel