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A Comparative Case Study on the Impact of Test-Driven Development on Program Design and Test Coverage

Year: 2007

Type: conference-paper

Abstract: Test-driven development (TDD) is a programming technique in which the tests are written prior to the source code. It is proposed that TDD is one of the most fundamental practices enabling the development of software in an agile and iterative manner. Both the literature and practice suggest that TDD practice yields several benefits. Essentially, it is claimed that TDD leads to an improved software design, which has a dramatic impact on the maintainability and further development of the system. The impact of TDD on program design has seldom come under the researchers' focus. This paper reports the results from a comparative case study of three software development projects where the effect of TDD on program design was measured using object-oriented metrics. The results show that the effect of TDD on program design was not as evident as expected, but the test coverage was significantly superior to iterative test-last development.

Source: Proceedings of the ... ACM-IEEE International Symposium on Empirical Software Engineering and Measurement/International Symposium on Empirical Software Engineering and Measurement

DOI: 10.1109/esem.2007.35

Authors: Maria Siniaalto, Pekka Abrahamsson

Institution: VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland

Language: English

Topic: Software Engineering Techniques and Practices

Subfield: Information Systems

Field: Computer Science

Domain: Physical Sciences

Open Access status: green

OpenAlex ID: W3105854783

FWCI: 1.452

Cites: 24

Cited by: 25

Related to: 10