Improving Business Agility Through Technical Solutions: A Case Study on Test-Driven Development in Mobile Software Development

This paper maintains that efficient business agility requires actions from all levels of the organization in order to strive for success in a turbulent business environment. Agility and agile software development solutions are suggested as yielding benefit in a volatile environment, which is characterized by continuously changing requirements and unstable development technologies. Test-driven development (TDD) is an agile practice where the tests are written before the actual program code. TDD is a technical enabler for increasing agility at the developer and product project levels. Existing empirical literature on TDD has demonstrated increased productivity and more robust code, among other important benefits. This paper reports results of a case study where a mobile application was developed for global markets, using the TDD approach. Our first results show that the adoption of TDD is difficult and the potential agility benefits may not be readily available. The lessons learned from the case study are presented.