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Thursday, March 5th, 2009

The cost of Test Driven Development

Posted in Development, Testing  |  Comments


A short and to the point post by Dror Helper at Typemock looks at industry findings on the cost benefits of doing TDD.

The Cost of Test Driven Development

..the research proved two points:

  1. Using TDD reduce the amount of bugs in the code significantly
  2. Using TDD takes more time then not using TDD

This is in line with what was expected, the question is does the extra time doing TDD reduce the quality or is it the unit testing.  Could doing Test Last unit testing give similar results?

There is also the unquantifiable part to the numbers in the quality of the developers in each team.  This has a significant impact on the code quality.  Using processes like TDD help to raise the bar for all of the developers and the cost benefit will improve over time.  It would be a very interesting exercise to see how these numbers work out in a typical SharePoint project.

On the same lines Phil Haack (great name) has a post on Bug Driven Development where he quotes Robert Glass and Steve McConnell on the costs not doing some form of automated testing which reinforces the value in getting the right processes in place.

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 5th, 2009 at 4:22 pm and is filed under Development, Testing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

  • Liam, I agree with you about the visibility of costs. I also think the problem is emphasised by the way contractors or partners are used. They generally only have an interest in the immediate delivery, not the longer term when they may not be the people doing the work.
  • Part of the problem is that the cost is exposed, but the benefit is not.

    I wrote a little bit about it http://hackingon.net/post/Test-Driven-Developme....
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