What is code coverage and how do YOU measure it?

Question

What is code coverage and how do YOU measure it?

I was asked this question regarding our automating testing code coverage. It seems to be that, outside of automated tools, it is more art than science. Are there any real-world examples of how to use code coverage?

Answer 1

Code coverage is a measurement of how many lines/blocks/arcs of your code are executed while the automated tests are running.

Code coverage is collected by using a specialized tool to instrument the binaries to add tracing calls and run a full set of automated tests against the instrumented product. A good tool will give you not only the percentage of the code that is executed, but also will allow you to drill into the data and see exactly which lines of code were executed during a particular test.

Our team uses Magellan - an in-house set of code coverage tools. If you are a .NET shop, Visual Studio has integrated tools to collect code coverage. You can also roll some custom tools, like this article describes.

If you are a C++ shop, Intel has some tools that run for Windows and Linux, though I haven't used them. I've also heard there's the gcov tool for GCC, but I don't know anything about it and can't give you a link.

As to how we use it - code coverage is one of our exit criteria for each milestone. We have actually three code coverage metrics - coverage from unit tests (from the development team), scenario tests (from the test team) and combined coverage.

BTW, while code coverage is a good metric of how much testing you are doing, it is not necessarily a good metric of how well you are testing your product. There are other metrics you should use along with code coverage to ensure the quality.