The effects of test driven development on internal quality, external quality and productivity: A systematic review

Bissi, Wilson; Neto, Adolfo Gustavo Serra Seca; Emer, Maria Claudia Figueiredo Pereira

doi:10.1016/j.infsof.2016.02.004

Cited by 64 publications

(81 citation statements)

References 15 publications

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“…We adopted the categorization used by Wangberg [19] and Bissi et al [62] to divide the studies according to applied research method. The research contribution facet contains two broad subcategories: empirical research and tool.…”

Section: Research Contribution Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Later, both the authors resolved the cases of discrepancies through diligent discussions and finally reached a consensus to include aforementioned seven categories. Secondly, the initial set of possible values for each category was established based on preliminary analysis performed on previous SLRs [19,25,28,[62][63]. Thirdly, we extracted the data by reading the full text of each selected PS to determine the exact set of values that each facet can hold as all the selected PSs cannot fit into predetermined set of values.…”

Section: Study Classificationmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Study setting specifies the context in which a study is conducted in order to assess the external validity of findings. Based on Bissi et al [62] suggestions, PSs were divided into two categories namely academic setting and industry setting. Academic studies consider the research performed by the university professionals or research organisations in scholastic world, whereas industrial studies consider the research conducted by software practitioners in industrial environment.…”

Section: Study Contextmentioning

confidence: 99%

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How does object-oriented code refactoring influence software quality? Research landscape and challenges

Kaur

Singh

2019

Journal of Systems and Software

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Context: Software refactoring aims to improve software quality and developer productivity. Numerous empirical studies investigating the impact of refactoring activities on software quality have been conducted over the last two decades.Objective: This study aims to perform a comprehensive systematic mapping study of existing empirical studies on evaluation of the effect of object-oriented code refactoring activities on software quality attributes. Method:We followed a multi-stage scrutinizing process to select 142 primary studies published till December 2017. The selected primary studies were further classified based on several aspects to answer the research questions defined for this work. In addition, we applied vote-counting approach to combine the empirical results and their analysis reported in primary studies. Results:The findings indicate that studies conducted in academic settings found more positive impact of refactoring on software quality than studies performed in industries. In general, refactoring activities caused all quality attributes to improve or degrade except for cohesion, complexity, inheritance, fault-proneness and power consumption attributes. Furthermore, individual refactoring activities have variable effects on most quality attributes explored in primary studies, indicating that refactoring does not always improve all quality attributes. Conclusions:This study points out several open issues which require further investigation, e.g., lack of industrial validation, lesser coverage of refactoring activities, limited tool support, etc.Keywords: Software quality, object-oriented software, refactoring activity, quality measures, systematic mapping study.© 2019. This manuscript version is made available under the CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ 1. Various industry practitioners are oblivious to the impact of refactoring activities on software quality.Consequently, while performing any refactoring activity, they feel reluctant as they believe refactoring may either break the code or result in the wastage of resources [16][17]. Their concerns can be attributed to the scarcity of appropriate sources that discuss state-of-the-art of software refactoring process and its benefits in a lucid manner. Hence, this paper reports an in-depth systematic mapping study (SMS) to analyse, synthesize and present the empirical findings related to the effect of refactoring activities targeting code smells on software quality. Awareness about the effect of planned refactoring changes on software quality will boost the confidence of developers in exercising software refactoring as regular development practice. 2. Retrospectively, it is observed that so far there have been only four literature surveys covering the relationship between refactoring and software quality. Among them, three [18][19][20] partially and one comprehensively (Dallal and Abdin; published in 2017 covering the literature till 2015) [21] explored the impact of refactoring activities on object-oriented softw...

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Section: Research Contribution Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Study Classificationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Study Contextmentioning

confidence: 99%

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How does object-oriented code refactoring influence software quality? Research landscape and challenges

Kaur

Singh

2019

Journal of Systems and Software

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“…These short and iterative testing-coding arXiv:1807.06850v2 [cs.SE] 20 Jul 2018 cycles are, according to its proponents [1], the main reason behind TDD's superiority over traditional approaches (e.g., Waterfall) with regard to software quality. Even though the performance of TDD on various software quality attributes [2] has been studied before [3,4,5,6,7,8,9], external quality seems to be the most investigated so far. External quality is usually considered in the TDD literature as the proportion of test cases that successfully pass from a battery of tests specifically built for testing the software system under development.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Does the Performance of TDD Hold Across Software Companies and Premises? A Group of Industrial Experiments on TDD

Santos

Järvinen

Partanen³

et al. 2018

Product-Focused Software Process Improvement

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Test-Driven Development (TDD) has been claimed to increase external software quality. However, the extent to which TDD increases external quality has been seldom studied in industrial experiments. We conduct four industrial experiments in two different companies to evaluate the performance of TDD on external quality. We study whether the performance of TDD holds across premises within the same company and across companies. We identify participant-level characteristics impacting results. Iterative-Test Last (ITL), the reverse approach of TDD, outperforms TDD in three out of four premises. ITL outperforms TDD in both companies. The larger the experience with unit testing and testing tools, the larger the difference in performance between ITL and TDD (in favour of ITL). Technological environment (i.e., programming language and testing tool) seems not to impact results. Evaluating participant-level characteristics impacting results in industrial experiments may ease the understanding of the performance of TDD in realistic settings.

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“…The specification of all the tasks can be found in the following link: http://www.grise.upm.es/Appendix/090618/Tasks.pdf 8. https://products.office.com/es/excel…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Improving Development Practices through Experimentation: An Industrial TDD Case

Santos

Spisak²,

Oivo

et al. 2018

2018 25th Asia-Pacific Software Engineering Conference (APSEC)

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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.

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The effects of test driven development on internal quality, external quality and productivity: A systematic review

Cited by 64 publications

References 15 publications

How does object-oriented code refactoring influence software quality? Research landscape and challenges

How does object-oriented code refactoring influence software quality? Research landscape and challenges

Does the Performance of TDD Hold Across Software Companies and Premises? A Group of Industrial Experiments on TDD

Improving Development Practices through Experimentation: An Industrial TDD Case

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