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Everyone knows about some relevant statistics about positive impact of using test/behavior driven development in real projects. I know statistics can be very misleading, but it would be nice to see something like:

"when started using TDD, we rose productivity and reduced bugs introduction by XY %...".

It would be really nice to show this numbers to managers/customers, when explaining need of writing tests (there are still some people thinking we don't have time for this...)


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Anecdotal evidence can be convincing to humans, even it shouldn't be. But beware that any such evidence is unlikely to generalize across languages, app domains, teams, etc. See also stackoverflow.com/questions/354124/… –  Brian Oct 3 '10 at 17:57
Also bear in mind that introducing TDD / BDD can actually increase perceived / measured bug counts as bugs get discovered more quickly, or users realise that people are capable of fixing bugs and start reporting them more. Has happened to a couple of teams I've been involved with. –  Lunivore Oct 5 '10 at 12:36
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up vote 12 down vote accepted

I have collected the following resources so far:

Realizing quality improvement through test driven development: results and experiences of four industrial teams (Microsoft Research):

Test driven development: empirical body of evidence (ITEA):

A Longitudinal Study of the Use of a Test-Driven Development Practice in Industry (IBM):

Evaluating Pair Programming with Respect to System Complexity and Programmer Expertise (IEEE):

There is a discussion on InfoQ:

Also check out this question:
Evidence based studies on the topic of best programming practices?

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The URL of the first one changed, it's now : research.microsoft.com/en-us/groups/ese/nagappan_tdd.pdf –  mrmuggles Jan 28 '12 at 3:31
@mrmuggles fixed it. –  rightfold May 22 at 14:54
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