Memorias de investigación
Research Publications in journals:
An industry experiment on the effects of test-driven development on external quality and productivity
Year:2017
Research Areas
  • Information technology and adata processing
Information
Abstract
Existing empirical studies on test-driven development (TDD) report different conclusions about its effects on quality and productivity. Very few of those studies are experiments conducted with software professionals in industry. We aim to analyse the effects of TDD on the external quality of the work done and the productivity of developers in an industrial setting. We conducted an experiment with 24 professionals from three different sites of a software organization. We chose a repeated-measures design, and asked subjects to implement TDD and incremental test last development (ITLD) in two simple tasks and a realistic application close to real-life complexity. To analyse our findings, we applied a repeated-measures general linear model procedure and a linear mixed effects procedure. We did not observe a statistical difference between the quality of the work done by subjects in both treatments. We observed that the subjects are more productive when they implement TDD on a simple task compared to ITLD, but the productivity drops significantly when applying TDD to a complex brownfield task. So, the task complexity significantly obscured the effect of TDD. Further evidence is necessary to conclude whether TDD is better or worse than ITLD in terms of external quality and productivity in an industrial setting. We found that experimental factors such as selection of tasks could dominate the findings in TDD studies.
International
Si
JCR
Si
Title
Empirical Software Engineering
ISBN
1382-3256
Impact factor JCR
3,275
Impact info
Volume
22
10.1007/s10664-016-9490-0
Journal number
6
From page
2763
To page
2805
Month
DICIEMBRE
Ranking
7 / 106
Participants
  • Autor: Ayse Tosun Istanbul Technical University
  • Autor: Oscar Dieste Tubio UPM
  • Autor: Davide Fucci University of Oulu
  • Autor: Sira Vegas Hernandez UPM
  • Autor: Burak Turhan University of Oulu
  • Autor: Hakan Erdogmus Carnegie Mellon University
  • Autor: Adrian Santos University of Oulu
  • Autor: Markku Oivo University of Oulu
  • Autor: Kimmo Toro FSecure Corporation
  • Autor: Janne Jarvinen FSecure Corporation
  • Autor: Natalia Juristo Juzgado UPM
Research Group, Departaments and Institutes related
  • Creador: Grupo de Investigación: Ingeniería del Software