  Test-driven Development (TDD) is an incremental approach to software
development. Despite it is claimed to improve both quality of software and
developers' productivity, the research on the claimed effects of TDD has so far
shown inconclusive results. Some researchers have ascribed these inconclusive
results to the negative affective states that TDD would provoke. A previous
(baseline) experiment has, therefore, studied the affective reactions of
(novice) developers---i.e., 29 third-year undergraduates in Computer Science
(CS)---when practicing TDD to implement software. To validate the results of
the baseline experiment, we conducted a replicated experiment that studies the
affective reactions of novice developers when applying TDD to develop software.
Developers in the treatment group carried out a development task using TDD,
while those in the control group used a non-TDD approach. To measure the
affective reactions of developers, we used the Self-Assessment Manikin
instrument complemented with a liking dimension. The most important differences
between the baseline and replicated experiments are: (i) the kind of novice
developers involved in the experiments---third-year vs. second-year
undergraduates in CS from two different universities; and (ii) their
number---29 vs. 59. The results of the replicated experiment do not show any
difference in the affective reactions of novice developers. Instead, the
results of the baseline experiment suggest that developers seem to like TDD
less as compared to a non-TDD approach and that developers following TDD seem
to like implementing code less than the other developers, while testing code
seems to make them less happy.
