Towards empirical evaluation of test-driven development in a university environment

Test driven development (TDD) is an agile software development technique and it is one of the core development practices of Extreme programming (XP). In TDD, developers write automatically executable tests prior to writing the code they test. We ran a set of experiments to empirically assess different parameters of the TDD. We compared TDD to a more "traditionally" oriented iterative test-last development process (ITL). Our preliminary results show that TDD is not substantially different from ITL and our qualitative findings about a development process are different from results obtained from other researches.