Test Driven Development by the Numbers
How much does TDD really cost
Test Driven Development (TDD) is well known and practiced methodology that reduce the amount of defects introduced during the coding stage of the development process. It is hard to determine how much money using TDD saved for an organization.
After searching the web for research I found a paper on the subject titled: Realizing quality improvement through test driven development: results and experiences of four industrial teams.
The research used four projects in IBM and Microsoft each project two teams were chosen – one team developed using TDD while the other team didn’t.
[Graphs taken from: Benefit From Unit Testing in THE REAL WORLD read about it here and here]
Although Using TDD took more time (15%-35%) the defect density (defects per feature) decreased tremendously!
If for example IBM Driver team that used TDD took 20% more time to code a certain feature it was well worth – they had 39% less defects then the team that finished before them, and in Microsoft’s teams the benefits are even greater.
TDD, What’s in it for You?
One can argue that the results doesn’t mean anything, even if a dev team has more defects those defects will be caught during QA and integration testing.
There is a known fact in software development – the longer it takes to find the bug the more it would cost to fix it.
Prevention defects at the coding stage saved the cost that fixing the same defect during the testing/support stage.
Another factor is the fact that defects found during testing really sends us back to the coding stage which means that although adding a feature without using TDD took less time initially in the long run when adding the QA –> Dev cycles it could take more.
An last during QA stage some more defects are introduced due to fixes of other defects (some claim that for every 3-10 bug fixes a new bug is added) – using TDD creates an integration test base that should prevent this from happening.
The Bottom Line
The research proved two points:
- Using TDD reduce the amount of bugs in the code significantly
- Using TDD takes more time then not using TDD
And I hope that after reading this post you understand that the amount of time invested in TDD actually well worth it due to the defect decrease and the money saved due to a quality increase of the code.
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