On the Sustained Use of a Test-Driven Development Practice at IBM

Test-driven development (TDD) is an agile practice that is widely accepted and advocated by most agile methods and methodologists. In this paper, we report on a post hoc analysis of the results of an IBM team who has sustained use of TDD for five years and over ten releases of a Java-implemented product. The team worked from a design and wrote tests incrementally before or while they wrote code and, in the process, developed a significant asset of automated tests. The IBM team realized sustained quality improvement relative to a pre-TDD project and consistently had defect density below industry standards. As a result, our data indicate that the TDD practice can aid in the production of high quality products. This quality improvement would compensate for the moderate perceived productivity losses. Additionally, our data indicates that the use of TDD may decrease the degree to which code complexity increases as software ages, as measured by cyclomatic complexity metric.