I am in the nation's capital today to present a co-authored paper on Test-Driven Development (TDD) at the Agile 2007 conference:
J. C. Sanchez, L. Williams, and E. M. Maximilien. A Longitudinal Study of the Use of Test-Driven Development Practice in Industry. In Proceedings of Agile 2007 Conference, pages 5-14, Washington DC, August. IEEE Computer Society. [ paper | presentation ]
There are a few groundbreaking results in this paper:
- It's the first of it's kind with results spanning five years of continuous usage of TDD
- We have empirical evidence that using TDD reduces the defect-density for almost every release
- We collected data that lead us to hypothesize that using TDD may reduce the complexity of software over time. As far as we know, we are the first to make this observation and have data to back it up
Overall, the presentation was well received, with lots of interesting questions. InfoQ was present and recorded it. I'll post the podcast and videocast links as soon I get them.
