# An Empirical Assessment on Affective Reactions of Novice Developers when Applying Test-Driven Development

## TL;DR

This study empirically investigates how Test-Driven Development affects novice developers' emotional states during different development phases, revealing significant differences that highlight the importance of affective factors in TDD adoption.

## Contribution

It provides the first empirical assessment of affective reactions of novices to TDD, using a controlled experiment and the Self-Assessment Manikin tool.

## Key findings

- TDD influences affective states of novice developers.
- Affective reactions differ between TDD and non-TDD approaches.
- Affective states vary across development and testing phases.

## Abstract

We study whether and in which phase Test-Driven Development (TDD) influences affective states of novice developers in terms of pleasure, arousal, dominance, and liking. We performed a controlled experiment with 29 novice developers. Developers in the treatment group performed a development task using TDD, whereas those in the control group used a non-TDD development approach. We compared the affective reactions to the development approaches, as well as to the implementation and testing phases, exploiting a lightweight, powerful, and widely used tool, i.e., Self-Assessment Manikin. We observed that there is a difference between the two development approaches in terms of affective reactions. Therefore, it seems that affective reactions play an important role when applying TDD and their investigation could help researchers to better understand such a development approach