Unit Test-Driven Development (UTDD) is a
software development practice where unit test cases are specified iteratively
and incrementally before production code. In the last years, researchers have
conducted several studies within academia and industry on the effectiveness of
this software development practice. They have investigated its utility as
compared to other development techniques, focusing mainly on code quality and
productivity. This quasi-experiment analyzes the influence of the developers’
experience level on the ability to learn and apply UTDD. The ability to apply
UTDD is measured in terms of process conformance and development time. From the
research point of view, our goal is to evaluate how difficult is learning UTDD
by professionals without any prior experience in this technique. From the
industrial point of view, the goal is to evaluate the possibility of using this
software development practice as an effective solution to take into account in
real projects. Our results suggest that skilled developers are able to quickly
learn the UTDD concepts and, after practicing them for a short while, become as
effective in performing small programming tasks as compared to more traditional
test-last development techniques. Junior programmers differ only in their
ability to discover the best design, and this translates into a performance
penalty since they need to revise their design choices more frequently than
senior programmers
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