Does Test-Driven Development Improve the Program Code? Alarming Results from a Comparative Case Study
نویسندگان
چکیده
It is suggested that test-driven development (TDD) is one of the most fundamental practices in agile software development, which produces loosely coupled and highly cohesive code. However, how the TDD impacts on the structure of the program code have not been widely studied. This paper presents the results from a comparative case study of five small scale software development projects where the effect of TDD on program design was studied using both traditional and package level metrics. The empirical results reveal that an unwanted side effect can be that some parts of the code may deteriorate. In addition, the differences in the program code, between TDD and the iterative test-last development, were not as clear as expected. This raises the question as to whether the possible benefits of TDD are greater than the possible downsides. Moreover, it additionally questions whether the same benefits could be achieved just by emphasizing unit-level testing activities.
منابع مشابه
Does Participation in Farmer Field School Extension Program Improve Crop Yields? Evidence from Smallholder Tea Production Systems in Kenya
Agricultural Extension services are among the most important rural services in developing countries. The services are considered to be a key driver of technological change and productivity growth in agriculture. In Kenya, like in the rest of the developing economies, agricultural extension has largely been delivered through supply–driven approaches. Due to perceived low impact of agricultural e...
متن کاملComparative Study of Test Driven Development with Traditional Techniques
Test-Driven Development is the evolutionary approach in which unit test cases are incrementally written prior to code implementation. In our research, we will be doing comparative study of Test Driven development with traditional techniques through literature study as well as industrial survey. Through this research, we would like to find out the factors encouraging the use of Test Driven Devel...
متن کاملAutomatic Generation of a Multi Agent System for Crisis Management by a Model Driven Approach
Considering the increasing occurrences of unexpected events and the need for pre-crisis planning in order to reduce risks and losses, modeling instant response environments is needed more than ever. Modeling may lead to more careful planning for crisis-response operations, such as team formation, task assignment, and doing the task by teams. A common challenge in this way is that the model shou...
متن کاملA 3D elasto-plastic FEM program developed for reservoir Geomechanics simulations: Introduction and case studies
The development of yielded or failure zone due to an engineering construction is a subject of study in different disciplines. In Petroleum engineering, depletion from and injection of gas into a porous rock can cause development of a yield zone around the reservoir. Studying this phenomenon requires elasto-plastic analysis of geomaterial, in this case the porous rocks. In this study, which is a...
متن کاملEffects of Test-Driven Development: A Comparative Analysis of Empirical Studies
Test-driven development is a software development practice where small sections of test code are used to direct the development of program units. Writing test code prior to the production code promises several positive effects on the development process itself and on associated products and processes as well. However, there are few comparative studies on the effects of test-driven development. ...
متن کامل