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An Empirical Study on the TDD Conformance of Novice and Expert Pair Programmers

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Agile Processes in Software Engineering and Extreme Programming (XP 2009)

Abstract

We conducted a quasi-experiment comparing the confor- mance to the test-driven development (TDD) process of one expert and two novice groups of programmers working in pairs. Besides an insignificant tendency of the expert group toward a higher TDD conformance and instruction coverage, we found that the expert group had refactored their code to a larger extent than the two novice groups. More surprisingly though, the pairs in the expert group were significantly slower than the pairs in one of the novice groups.

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Höfer, A., Philipp, M. (2009). An Empirical Study on the TDD Conformance of Novice and Expert Pair Programmers. In: Abrahamsson, P., Marchesi, M., Maurer, F. (eds) Agile Processes in Software Engineering and Extreme Programming. XP 2009. Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing, vol 31. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-01853-4_6

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-01853-4_6

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-642-01852-7

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-642-01853-4

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