Test-Driven Development: An Empirical Evaluation of Agile Practice

Agile methods are gaining more and more interest both in industry and in research. Many industries are transforming their way of working from traditional waterfall projects with long duration to more incremental, iterative and agile practices. At the same time, the need to evaluate and to obtain evidence for different processes, methods and tools has been emphasized.

Lech Madeyski offers the first in-depth evaluation of agile methods. He presents in detail the results of three different experiments, including concrete examples of how to conduct statistical analysis with meta analysis or the SPSS package, using as evaluation indicators the number of acceptance tests passed (overall and per hour) and design complexity metrics.

The book is appropriate for graduate students, researchers and advanced professionals in software engineering. It proves the real benefits of agile software development, provides readers with in-depth insights into experimental methods in the context of agile development, and discusses various validity threats in empirical studies.

Lech Madeyski is Assistant Professor in the Software Engineering Department, Institute of Informatics, Wroclaw University of Technology, Poland. His current research interests include: experimentation in software engineering, software metrics and models, software quality and testing, software products and process improvement, and agile software development methodologies (e.g., eXtreme Programming).

He has published research papers in refereed software engineering journals (e.g., IET Software, Journal of Software Process: Improvement and Practice) and conferences (e.g., PROFES, XP, EuroSPI, CEE-SET). He has been a member of the program, steering, or organization committee for several software engineering conferences such as PROFES (International Conference on Product Focused Software Process Improvement), ENASE (International Working Conference on Evaluation of Novel Approaches to Software Engineering), CEE-SET (Central and East-European Conference on Software Engineering Techniques), and BPSC (International Working Conference on Business Process and Services Computing).

His paper at PROFES 2007 received the Best Paper Award.