The effectiveness of test-driven development approach on software projects: A multi-case study
Open accessAbstract
Over recent years, software teams and companies have made attempts to achieve higher productivity and efficiency and get more success in the competitive market by employing proper software methods and practices. Test-driven development (TDD) is one of these practices. The literature review shows that this practice can lead to the improvement of the software development process. Existing empirical studies on TDD report different conclusions about its effects on quality and productivity. The present study tried to briefly report the results from a comparative multiple-case study of two software development projects where the effect of TDD within an industrial environment. Method: We conducted an experiment in an industrial case with 18 professionals. We measured TDD effectiveness in terms of team productivity and code quality. We also measured mood metric and cyclomatic complexity to compare our results with the literature. We have found that the test cases written for a TDD task have higher defect detection ability than test cases written for an incremental NON-TDD development task. Additionally, discovering bugs and fixing them became easier. The results obtained showed the TDD developers develop software code with a higher quality rate, and it results in increasing team productivity than NON_TDD developers.
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TDD increases job satisfaction and engagement.
“Furthermore, TDD has motivated developers, resulting in higher job satisfaction, engagement, and a preference for this approach [14].”
From Test Driven Development and Its Impact on Program Design and Software Quality: A Systematic Literature Review (2023) · cites this paper as [14]
The Conclusion (p. 2036) says TDD’s effectiveness can encourage developers to use it in projects, which partly supports motivation and preference. It does not report higher job satisfaction or engagement; the satisfaction measured in the case results is customer satisfaction, not developer satisfaction. (LLM, conf=0.84)
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- Authors
- Bakhtiary, V., Gandomani, T. J., & Salajegheh, A.
- Affiliations
- Shahrekord University (IR)
- Venue
- Bulletin of Electrical Engineering and Informatics
- Published
- 2020-10-01
- Volume
- 9
- Issue
- 5
- Pages
- 2030-2037
- ISSN
- 2089-3191 (ISSN-L)
- 2302-9285
- OpenAlex
- W3017815105
- Cited by
- 5
- References
- 33
- Citations by year
- 2024: 2 · 2023: 3
- FWCI
- 0.71
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- diamond
- doi.org
- Locations
- Bulletin of Electrical Engineering and Informatics (publishedVersion)
- Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research) (submittedVersion, cc-by)
- Topics
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Information Systems › Software Engineering Techniques and Practices
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Software › Software Testing and Debugging Techniques
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Information Systems › Software Engineering Research
- Keywords
- test-driven development, software productivity, code quality, defect detection, cyclomatic complexity, industrial software projects, software testing practices
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