How Effective is Test Driven Development?
Friday, June 11th, 2010I’ve been working with Lucas Layman, Madeline Diep, Forrest Shull and Hakan Erdogmus to collect and analyze the quantitative evidence from literature regarding the effects of TDD on programmer productivity, internal/external product quality and test support. Our results will soon be available as a chapter in the upcoming O’Reilly book “Making Software: What Really Works, and Why We Believe It“, edited by Andy Oram and Greg Wilson; a book that specifically addresses practitioners.
Before the book hits the stores, it will also be available through RoughCuts. I’ll also try to provide a copy of our chapter here to the extent that our copyright agreement allows. I hope that you’ll enjoy reading it as we employed an unconventional way of story telling. Yes, it’s not a “boring” research report, you can take my word for it!
About a month ago, I have joined the Department of Information Processing Science at the University of Oulu in Finland, as a researcher (though I will participate in teaching activities as well). It feels good to be back in the university! After spending significant number of days for new-comer’s-bureaucracy-to-a-new-country, I am getting ready for the upcoming days of “please fund my research” activities, actual research and paper writing. Oulu seems to be a very peaceful city and just the perfect environment for productive research. I also decided to learn Finnish, so why not start with learning the bus routes!