Code Coverage Myths and Realities

You've made a commitment to automate unit testing as part of your development process or you are spending precious resources for automated functional testing at higher levels. You may be asking yourself: How good are those tests anyway? Are many tests checking the same thing while large parts of the code go completely untested? Are your tests triggering the exceptions that normally show up only in production? Are your automated tests adequately covering the code, the requirements-both, neither? Andrew discusses the truths and untruths about code coverage and looks at the tools available to gather and report coverage metrics in both the opensource and commercial worlds. He describes the different types of code coverage, their advantages and disadvantages, and how to interpret the results of coverage reports.

• The concept of mutation testing and how it fits into a code coverage strategy
• How the different types of code coverage (branch, line coverage, etc.) can mislead
• Actionable items obtained from coverage results