In this paper, we investigate the effect of TDD, as compared to a non-TDD approach, as well as its retainment (or retention) over a time span of (about) six months. To pursue these objectives, we conducted a (quantitative) longitudinal cohort study with 30 novice developers (i.e., third-year undergraduate students in Computer Science). We observed that TDD affects neither the external quality of software products nor developers’ productivity. However, we observed that the participants applying TDD produced significantly more tests, with a higher fault-detection capability, than those using a non-TDD approach. As for the retainment of TDD, we found that TDD is retained by novice developers for at least six months.

在本文中，我们研究了TDD的影响，相比于非TDD方式，以及其retainment（或保留超过（约）六个月的时间跨度）。为了实现这些目标，我们与30个新手开发人员（即计算机科学专业的三年级学生）进行了（定量）纵向队列研究。我们观察到，TDD既不影响软件产品的外部质量也不影响开发人员的生产率。但是，我们观察到，与使用非TDD方法的参与者相比，使用TDD的参与者进行了更多的测试，具有更高的故障检测能力。至于TDD的保留，我们发现TDD被新手开发人员保留了至少六个月。