Alexander Beletsky's development blog

My profession is engineering

Is TDD Required Skill? - Two Years Later

TDD

Two years ago I’ve concluded an interesting research. I was thinking how much employers care about hiring developers with TDD skills while looking for suitable candidates. As output of this research I’ve created a simple crawler, that is able to crawl vacancy web sites and perform the simple analysis does this vacancy description require TDD skill or not. As well, I’ve created some blog posts, where I did share results + some technical issues I met during building this crawler.

At the weekend, I’ve decided to repeat this experiment. The code of crawler worked perfectly, except some correction I had to apply to conform the markup changes of sites that happed through these two years. Leaving the technical part of this blog post, I want to share the results with you.

What was at 2010?

Let’s recap what it was at 2010. I’ve crawled 978 records from rabota.ua site and 150 of 978 (about 15%) contained TDD requirement. For careers.stackoverflow.com the results was a little better, ~23% (49 of 212) contained some mention on TDD.

The quote from 2 year ago report:

.. 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.

I believe the awareness of TDD and general software quality got higher along the way. But let’s see the figures of 2012.

What we have in 2012?

This time I got a litle more data. 1067 records of rabota.ua and 560 records of careers.stackoverflow.com. But what about demand?

All right, it’s only 77 vacancies of 1067 is requiring TDD, which is 7.22% in rabota.ua. careers.stackoverflow.com has 127 vacancies requiring TDD which is 22.68%.


The technologies breakdown is follows. Java leads as a technology with the highest demand on TDD. During this post creation I thought that my results does include JavaScript, which gain much popularity recently. It’s interesting to see what’s there.


Conclusions

Ukrainian market demand lowered almost twice. USA market demand is stable, with a little change which is almost the noise.

  • Ukraine: 2010 -> 15.34%, 2012 -> 7.22% ( -8.12% )
  • USA: 2010 -> 23.11%, 2012 -> 22.68% ( -0.43% )

I can see very low demand on TDD in C/C++ field. Almost equal demand between Java and .NET with a slight win of Java.

I personally wanted to see different figures. Anyway, it was interesting to see actual results and restored some code that worked 2 years ago. Probably this analysis required to be done more frequently to have a kind of valuable statistics.