Improving Development Practices through Experimentation: an Industrial TDD Case

Abstract: Test-Driven Development (TDD), an agile development approach that enforces the construction of software systems by means of successive micro-iterative testing coding cycles, has been widely claimed to increase external software quality. In view of this, some managers at Paf-a Nordic gaming entertainment company-were interested in knowing how would TDD perform at their premises. Eventually, if TDD outperformed their traditional way of coding (i.e., YW, short for Your Way), it would be possible to switch to TDD considering the empirical evidence achieved at the company level. We conduct an experiment at Paf to evaluate the performance of TDD, YW and the reverse approach of TDD (i.e., ITL, short for Iterative-Test Last) on external quality. TDD outperforms YW and ITL at Paf. Despite the encouraging results, we cannot recommend Paf to immediately adopt TDD as the difference in performance between YW and TDD is small. However, as TDD looks promising at Paf, we suggest to move some developers to TDD and to run a future experiment to compare the performance of TDD and YW. TDD slightly outperforms ITL in controlled experiments for TDD novices. However, more industrial experiments are still needed to evaluate the performance of TDD in real-life contexts.