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What is Continuous Coverage?

April 24, 2021 comments off

Code coverage is a measure of how much code is executed during testing & Test coverage is a measure of how many test cases have been executed during testing.

In computer science, code coverage is a measure used to describe the degree to which the source code of a program is tested by a particular test suite. A program with high code coverage has been more thoroughly tested and has a lower chance of containing software bugs than a program with low code coverage. Many different metrics can be used to calculate code coverage; some of the most basic are the percent of program subroutines and the percent of program statements called during execution of the test suite.

Simply put, code coverage is a way of ensuring that your tests are actually testing your code. When you run your tests you are presumably checking that you are getting the expected results. Code coverage will tell you how much of your code you exercised by running the test. Your tests may all pass with flying colors, but if you’ve only tested 50% of your code, how much confidence can you have in it?

This is a per team and per environment decision. You should first determine your threshold for build duration, and then factor out longer running processes into less-frequent occurrences (ideally no fewer than 1 or 2 times a day in CI) once that has been determined.

Code coverage is a relatively stable metric, in that it is relatively rare that your code coverage numbers would get dramatically worse within a single day. So if the code coverage is taking a long time to perform, then it’s not really critical that it occurs on every build. But you should still try to get code coverage numbers at least once a night. Nightly builds can be allowed to take a bit longer, since there (presumably) won’t be anybody waiting on them, but they still provide regular feedback about your project’s status and ensure there aren’t lots of unforeseen problems being introduced.

There is not any official distinguished between code Coverage and Test Coverage. Some practitioner has expressed their difference opinion in terms of defining Code Coverage and Test Coverge. Code coverage and test coverage metrics are both measurements that can be useful to assess the quality of your application code. Code coverage is a term to describe which application code is exercised when the application is running. Whereas Test coverage refers to metrics in an overall test-plan.

Basic coverage criteria
There are a number of coverage criteria, the main ones being:

  • Function coverage – Has each function (or subroutine) in the program been called?
  • Statement coverage – Has each statement in the program been executed?
  • Branch coverage – Has each branch (also called DD-path) of each control structure (such as in if and case statements) been executed? For example, given an if statement, have both the true and false branches been executed? Another way of saying this is, has every edge in the program been executed?
  • Condition coverage (or predicate coverage) – Has each Boolean sub-expression evaluated both to true and false?
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