Alexander Beletsky's development blog

My profession is engineering

Update - Is TDD skill actually required by employers? - with data from StackOverflow

TDD

This is a follow up for my last blog post, that I showed some data gathered by crawler, to check out how much TDD skill is valuable for development shops, how much do they ask for it in offers? As you remember I was satisfied with a quality of data provided by prgjobs.com.

Today, I was reading a blog post from a Coding Horrow and understood that I missed one good source of information, that is StackOverflow Careers

Due to the latest architectural changes I’ve made to Crawler and well structure of Careers, it took about hour to create new crawler and test it. Now, I’m ready to share the data.

Careers.StackOverflow results

Here we go - 212 vacancies has been extracted from this site. 49 of them were requesting TDD (23%, not so bad).

Technologies breakdown,

Conclusions

For sure, it is more correct data. We can see that results are really close the one we’ve got for Ukrainian market, by analysis of rabotaua site. It also make it possible to make some generalization of results.

We could say that ~20% of employers are demanding on TDD skill. Rest of employers either do not mention it in applications or do not care about such skill at all.

Ciprian Mustiata gave nice point in comments for previous post, that such demand on TDD could be reasonable for countries like Ukraine, where major market is for maintenance of existing code base (typically legacy code, no tests). But we see similar figures for USA, country where a lot of brand new product born.

That’s another piece of information to think about. What’s your opinion on that?