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The effect of experience on the use of TDD

The effect of experience on the use of TDD. Tor Stålhane According to M.M. Muller and A. Høfner. Goal. Is TDD a techniques that just anybody can use and immediately achieve good results? Or Is TDD a technique that will help experienced developers to perform better that they otherwise would?

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The effect of experience on the use of TDD

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  1. The effect of experience on the use of TDD Tor Stålhane According to M.M. Muller and A. Høfner

  2. Goal Is TDD a techniques that just anybody can use and immediately achieve good results? Or Is TDD a technique that will help experienced developers to perform better that they otherwise would? The reported experiment tries to find answers to these questions.

  3. Participants • Novice group – 11 students from an XP course. • Experts – 7 experienced developers. Statistically, the two groups are too small to identify small to medium effects. For large effects, however, 28 persons will be enough.

  4. The development task – 1 Each participant should develop a control system for an elevator. The system has: • A request component – activated when we press the up or down button • A job component – activated when we pushes the selected floor button • A state machine with the states • Driving up • Driving down • Waiting • Open

  5. The development task – 2 For each cycle of the state machine, the system fetches a list of requests and jobs. The participants received • A state transition diagram • A program skeleton that contained the implementation of the three states “driving up”, “driving down” and “waiting” as mock objects The experiment participants should implement code for the state “Open”.

  6. Research hypothesis – 1 H1: Experts have a higher degree of conformance to the TDD rules than novices have. H2: The experts have a shorter development cycle than the novices have. H3: The experts have a smaller variation in cycle length than the novices have H4: The experts have less code changes than the novices have

  7. Research hypothesis – 2 H5: The experts are faster than the novices when it comes to code changing – lines of code changed per hour H6: The tests developed by the experts has a higher coverage than the tests developed by the novices.

  8. Conformance to TDD rules This was measured as follows: • TDD changes: • change in methods which were previously called by a test that failed • new methods that were later called by a test that failed • Refactoring: changes in the structure of the code but not its observable behavior.

  9. K1 Outlayer * K3 Median K1 – 1.5(K3 – K1) K3 + 1.5(K3 – K1) What is a box plot In order to read some of the diagrams that follows, you need to understand a box plot.

  10. Small box plot example • A total of 24 observations • M: median • K1: first quartile • K2: second quartile – the same as the median • K3: third quartile x x x x x x x x x x x xx x x xx x xx M K1 K3 x x x x

  11. TDD conformance results – 1

  12. TDD conformance results – 2 H1 is confirmed – experts are more conform to the method than the novices are

  13. Development cycle H2 and H3 are confirmed – experts work faster and more consistent

  14. Code changes H4 is rejected – experts and novices change the same amount of test code and application code

  15. Speed of change H5 is accepted for application code but not for tests.

  16. Coverage H6 is accepted both for statement coverage and for block coverage

  17. Added LOC at first acceptance test Experts write smaller code chunks both for application and for tests

  18. Failed tests at first acceptance test Novices wrote many tests that did not fail.

  19. Do TDD like a pro • Improve refactoring. Change structure, not behavior. • Strive for high test coverage. • Write small chunks of code and tests • Focus on missing functionality - write tests that will fail

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