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An Empirical Assessment on Affective Reactions of Novice Developers When Applying Test-Driven Development

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Product-Focused Software Process Improvement (PROFES 2019)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNPSE,volume 11915))

Abstract

We study whether and in which phase Test-Driven Development (TDD) influences affective states of novice developers in terms of pleasure, arousal, dominance, and liking. We performed a controlled experiment with 29 novice developers. Developers in the treatment group performed a development task using TDD, whereas those in the control group used a non-TDD development approach. We compared the affective reactions to the development approaches, as well as to the implementation and testing phases, exploiting a lightweight, powerful, and widely used tool, i.e., Self-Assessment Manikin. We observed that there is a difference between the two development approaches in terms of affective reactions. Therefore, it seems that affective reactions play an important role when applying TDD and their investigation could help researchers to better understand such a development approach.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.9778019.v1.

  2. 2.

    Although refactoring is part of the process underlying TDD, we did not consider this phase because refactoring could not be performed when following a non-TDD development approach (and some participants who used a non-TDD approach did not refactor their code).

  3. 3.

    In TL development, a developer first implements a feature entirely and then tests it.

  4. 4.

    In ITL development, a developer alternates implementing a code increment with testing that increment until the entire feature is implemented.

  5. 5.

    https://concordion.org/.

  6. 6.

    STR does not meet the normality assumption (Shapiro-Wilk normality test p−value \(=\) 0.0114); this is why we run ATS (rather than ANOVA).

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Bari, Bari, Italy

    Simone Romano, Maria Teresa Baldassarre & Danilo Caivano

  2. University of Hamburg, Hamburg, Germany

    Davide Fucci

  3. University of Basilicata, Potenza, Italy

    Giuseppe Scanniello

Authors
  1. Simone Romano
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  2. Davide Fucci
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  3. Maria Teresa Baldassarre
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  4. Danilo Caivano
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  5. Giuseppe Scanniello
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Simone Romano .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, Barcelona, Spain

    Xavier Franch

  2. University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland

    Tomi Männistö

  3. Fraunhofer Institute for Experimental Software Engineering, Kaiserslautern, Germany

    Silverio Martínez-Fernández

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Romano, S., Fucci, D., Baldassarre, M.T., Caivano, D., Scanniello, G. (2019). An Empirical Assessment on Affective Reactions of Novice Developers When Applying Test-Driven Development. In: Franch, X., Männistö, T., Martínez-Fernández, S. (eds) Product-Focused Software Process Improvement. PROFES 2019. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 11915. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-35333-9_1

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