Agiles Testen in Großprojekten mit TDD und Testaspekten: Beobachtungen und erste Erfahrungen

Several companies in the software development industry discovered the need for more agility in their business. Agile software development frameworks like Extreme Programming (XP) point out, that testing has a major role within it [1]. Especially techniques like Test-Driven Development (TDD) [2] where code is implemented according to prior defined test cases promise high quality through testable code. Although the advantages of using TDD in small and medium projects has been shown (see [3] or [14]), the use in large-scale projects is still missing. At Capgemini sd&m we run projects with agile development models like Scrum [12]. We have observed that, nevertheless, in most of the projects TDD is not used. In interviews with the responsible test managers we have identified the following underlying reasons: • Project leaders shy the risk of additional costs and of not getting ready in time. • TDD approaches often lack of structured test design methods and of measurable functional test coverage. • The resulting test cases seem to be too fine grained. Higher level test cases are then still missing. • TDD usually results in a large number of test cases, which are difficult to maintain over a longer period.