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Survey on unit testing / TDD - participants wanted
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| Fabian Neumann 2006-06-28, 7:06 pm |
| Hello Group,
we would like to invite developers to participate in a survey about unit
testing and test-driven development. We are students from the Freie
Universität, Berlin, Germany, and have created this survey for a project
of our software engineering working group.
To participate you must have worked on projects using unit testing,
ideally but not necessarily with a test-driven approach. This is not
limited to professional work; experiences from personal or community
projects are welcome, too.
Answering the 30 questions will take approx. 10-15 minutes. The survey
is open until July 3 12:00 UTC.
If you decide to participate you may leave your mail address so we can
inform you about the results.
The following link takes you to our website:
http://survey.mi.fu-berlin.de/publi...ey.php?name=tdd
Thanks in advance for your time.
Cheers,
Fabian Neumann, Benjamin Schröter, Sascha Weinmann
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| Fabian Neumann wrote:
> http://survey.mi.fu-berlin.de/publi...ey.php?name=tdd
In the first third, your survey wastes many questions by saying "if you
have a Design Phase, answer all these questions". The point of TDD is to
mix just-enough Design activities with coding. So if I follow the exact
rules of the survey, then the answer to "How often do these Test Cases
serve as a functional specification for developers?" is "We do not use
test cases to define interfaces".
That is distressing because you have no category for the positive answer.
Developers, not "architects", develop their own test cases that specify
their own interfaces, during the Implementation Phase.
Next, the question "Does unit testing save you work and if so, when?
(Multiple answers possible)" has no category for the most important
answer: "yes, TDD helps prevent bugs".
Your closest option, "TDD helps discover bugs", contains the latent
assumption that bugs are always present to discover. Because the TDD cycle
aggressively resists them, and leads to strong and clear code with few
opportunities for bugs, there are often vanishingly few of them to s .
--
Phlip
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