| This dissertation investigates the uses of Story Test Driven Development in Agile software development teams. There are three main research questions: 1) What problems are faced by Agile teams in practicing Story Test Driven Development? 2) Investigate the relationship between stories, teams and defects. 3) What are the factors that lead to successful adoption of Story Test Driven Development? In this dissertation, we explore these questions using four case studies.;In addition, we discovered that the main bottleneck in the successful adoption of Story Test Driven Development is the customer participation. Story Test Driven Development is a way for customers to engage in software product creation in a much more direct way. There should be a community of contributors and personal rewards for contributing the story tests. The contributors exhibit "selfish altruism" in their motivation for participation. The success of Story Test Driven Development is not in producing better software testing methods but in fostering the community of contributors.;The main contribution of this research is to approach Story Test Driven Development as a knowledge building process rather than as a software testing process. The studies suggest that Story Test Driven Development is particularly useful for communicating domain knowledge between customers (domain experts) and the developers. The automated testing aspect of the story tests allows developers to implicitly learn and directly validate their understanding of the domain knowledge and the requirements. Story tests are not a software testing tool, but a validation tool about how domain knowledge and other requirements should be implemented in software. |
