QASymphony, a testing services company, has recently released the State of Test-First Methodologies 2016 Report, a survey of over 200 people/organizations from 15 countries. The purpose of the survey was to evaluate the adoption of test-first technologies -BDD/ATDD/TDD – and how they are perceived by respondents.
The main takeaways that we have extracted from the report are:
Nearly half of the respondents have not implemented a BDD/ATDD/TDD approach. Regarding those who have adopted such technologies, 37% have done it in the last year, and only a small minority (~13%) have up to 3 years or more practice in this field.
From those who have implemented a test-first solution to software development, almost half have done it to increase the quality of their software, 23% have done it for a better collaboration between team members and increased understanding of product requirements, 12% for faster delivery and 8% to have more automation.
In half of those organizations (52%), developers along with testers are responsible for writing tests, while in other 40% of them only those assigned as testers. In only a small fraction (2.7%) of software makers developers are fully responsible for writing tests.
When it came to what hinders the adoption of a test-first methodology, the largest group (~44%) cited fear of “forcing developers to contribute to tests before writing code.” It seems there is a strong resentment among certain programmers to the idea of doing something that seems to be “useless” rather than doing what they like, writing code that works toward implementing features. The next group of respondents (~36%) fear changing the existing testing procedures or framework with a new automated testing framework.
45% of the respondents managed to switch to a test-first approach in less than 3 months, while 30% needed up to a year. Some (~12%) needed 3 years or more. Regarding the suggestions they would make to others interested in test-first, the survey concludes that the cultural factor is paramount:
Getting the entire team on board as well as all levels of the organization is key to gaining the understanding and collaboration needed to make the test-first shift successful. Additionally, patience is key, both in finding the right sized project to get started as well as setting realistic goals and waiting long enough to see results. Overall, it seemed like technical skills and tool implementation fell low on the list of concerns for most organizations looking in the rearview mirror on a test-first implementation.
Respondents use a large variety of test-first tools, mostly open source. JUnit has preeminence among unit testing tools, and Cucumber among BDD ones.
For those interested in reading more findings, such as what other process have people used before, what they think is the next big thing in testing, what they fear about TDD/BDD, etc., we recommend reading the entire report.