Re: paper: Test-Driven Development Benefits Beyond Design Quality: Flow State and Developer Experience
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I would not advocate engineering faculty attempting to apply sophisticated social science research techniques, partly because it takes years of work to learn how to do it right and partly because it is detrimental to your career.? What I would advocate is interdisciplinary research involving both people who understand software development and people who understand how groups of people work.? There are still the problems of where to publish such research that both silos would accept and who would actually be qualified to evaluate such research.
I was part of a group trying to do that in 2002-3, but we found no journal or conference who considered it to be in their purview.? Some pure social science research was successfully published.
Perhaps some pointers to examples of research you approve of would have helped here?
If the developer experience is better, present some concrete evidence, not just that it feels better.? Maybe, developer retention in the real world?? (Do developers stay longer at companies that practice TDD?)
I would have thought that when talking about developer experience, "feeling better" is potentially a valid data point.
Totally agree on using social research approaches for this. Helen Sharp (Open University) did some interesting observational studies, including one of my team at the time. She had a certain amount of opposition from the more "hard-core engineering" colleagues in her department, which was short sighted on their side.
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