Evaluation of Test Driven Development Adoption
Here are the results: Unit testing is not performed 13% Unit testing is informal 46% Unit tests cases are documented 11% Unit tests cases and their executions are documented 16% We use a Test Driven Development approach 14% Participants: 460 These results do not claim any scientific value, but they give some information on the adoption of TDD in organizations. The rate of adoption of TDD could be considered as encouraging for a relatively young approach. This rate could also be put in perspective with a poll on agile approaches targeting a similar audience. In this poll run at the beginning of 2005, 40% of the participants have adopted and deployed, partially or completely, agile practices. This should mean that around 1/3 of agile practitioners are using TDD. Unit testing is still performed informally by a majority of participants. This is symptomatic of the small consideration that is given to the testing activities in most software development projects. When the pressure to deliver is big, testing informally makes it easier to execute poorly without being noticed as you don’t have to provide evidence of your activity. It is however recognized that unit testing is an important building block of system quality and that it costs more to correct errors discovered in later project phases. Good documentation of unit tests allows also to improve maintenance when the original developer has left the project or the company, because it can limit the occurrence that the correction introduced a negative side-effect. From this point of view, it is already encouraging to see that 41% of the participants are documenting their unit testing efforts. These percentages are already important, as we know that documentation is not the preferred activity of software developers. They could be explained by the emergence of a wide range of open source unit testing frameworks in the xUnit family. They are the tools that should lead to more and more repeatable unit tests. Source: Methods & Tools (www.methodsandtools.com)
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