A Tool to Measure TDD Compliance: A Case Study with Professionals

Abstract

Context: There are several studies related to Test Driven Development (TDD), but many with divergences of results due to the short time to perform the experiments. Moreover, the environment where they are carried out is generally academic. On the other hand, the environment requires tools not used by practitioners or imposes many technical and training requirements for their application. Goal: The goal of this paper is to provide a tool that supports the evaluation of the TDD process in the software industry and academia settings. The tool focuses on analyzing the effects of verification, validation and test (VV&T). In addition, the compliance of TDD usage in software development was evaluated. Method: This study made use of the Goal Question Metric (GQM) paradigm to characterize a set of objectives using metrics towards TDD effects on software quality. A case study was conducted with IT professionals to evaluate the tool developed. Results: Considering the existing tools that perform TDD compliance assessment, the Butterfly tool was developed to enable the evaluation of the TDD lifecycle as the developer performs the coding of the software. With this tool it is possible to analyze the compliance of TDD usage during software development. Conclusions: The tool allows to measure the effects of TDD when developing software, which will support in the characterization of TDD contributions and interventions applied to software quality in future works.