Students’ and professionals’ perceptions of test-driven development: a focus group study

We have conducted a qualitative investigation on test-driven development (TDD) with focus groups in order to develop insights on the opinions of developers using TDD regarding the unintuitive process involved, its claimed effects, as well as the context factors that can facilitate (or hinder) its application. In particular, we conducted two focus group sessions: one with professional developers and another with Master students in Computer Science at the University of Basilicata. We used thematic analysis template (TAT) method for iden- tifying patterns, themes, and interpretations in the gathered data. The application of this qualitative method allowed us to obtain a number of results that can provide directions for future research. Our main results can be summarized as follows: (i) applying TDD without knowing advanced unit testing techniques can be difficult; (ii) refactoring (one of the phases of TDD) is not done as often as the process re- quires; (iii) there is a need for live feedback to let developers understand if TDD is being applied correctly; and (iv) the usefulness of TDD hinges on task and domain to which it is applied to.