# A Longitudinal Cohort Study on the Retainment of Test-Driven Development

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1807.02971 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.02971/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 9 Jul 2018.

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [How do Machine Learning Models Change?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.09645/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Background: Test-Driven Development (TDD) is an agile software development practice, which is claimed to boost both external quality of software products and developers' productivity. Aims: We want to study (i) the TDD effects on the external quality of software products as well as the developers' productivity, and (ii) the retainment of TDD over a period of five months. Method: We conducted a (quantitative) longitudinal cohort study with 30 third year undergraduate students in Computer Science at the University of Bari in Italy. Results: The use of TDD has a statistically significant effect neither on the external quality of software products nor on the developers' productivity. However, we observed that participants using TDD produced significantly more tests than those applying a non-TDD development process and that the retainment of TDD is particularly noticeable in the amount of tests written. Conclusions: Our results should encourage software companies to adopt TDD because who practices TDD tends to write more tests---having more tests can come in handy when testing software systems or localizing faults---and it seems that novice developers retain TDD.