Students’ and Professionals’ Perceptions of Test-driven Development: A Focus Group Study

Abstract

We have conducted a qualitative investigation on test-driven development (TDD) with focus groups 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 professionals and another with Master students in Computer Science. We used thematic analysis template (TAT) method for identifying patterns, themes, and interpretations in gathered data. We obtained a number of results that 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 requires; (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.