An Empirical Assessment on Affective Reactions of Novice Developers when Applying Test-Driven Development
This research addresses the problem of understanding emotional impacts on novice developers when using TDD, which could help improve software engineering practices, but it is incremental as it builds on existing studies of TDD and affective states.
The study investigated how Test-Driven Development (TDD) affects the affective states (pleasure, arousal, dominance, liking) of novice developers during implementation and testing phases, finding a difference in affective reactions between TDD and non-TDD approaches in a controlled experiment with 29 participants.
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