Automated Recognition of Low-Level Process: A Pilot Validation Study of Zorro for Test-Driven Development

Abstract. Zorro is a system designed to automatically determine whether a developer is complying with the Test-Driven Development (TDD) process. Automated recognition of TDD could benefit the software engineering community in a variety of ways, from pedagogical aids to support the learning of test-driven design, to support for more rigorous empirical studies on the effectiveness of TDD in practice. This paper presents the Zorro system and the results of a pilot validation study, which shows that Zorro was able to recognize test-driven design episodes correctly 89% of the time. The results also indicate ways to improve Zorro’s classification accuracy further, and provide evidence for the effectiveness of this approach to low-level software process recognition.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2006
• Where: ISPW
• Authors: Hongbing Kou, Philip M. Johnson
• Keywords: ISPW 2006, Software Engineering, Test-Driven Design, Test-driven Development, Zorro