Saturday, April 5, 2008

Code Coverage Analysis

How effective is Code Coverage Analysis ? 

In your opinion who should do this activity ?

Code coverage analysis(CCA) to achieve quality is as good as the cases considered while coding and then testing. CCA can only find out "wasted efforts" (in unreachable codes) and effectiveness of "test cases". So CCA can be effective to ensure quality only if the test cases are exhaustive. Ofcourse it can't ensure quality through performance, brevity of code, memore usage, etc. So effectiveness of CCA and its association with quality is extremely limited. 

The result of CCA needs to be analyzed carefully because say a high coverage can result even due to inexhaustive test cases.


In my opinion, CCA should not be done by the developer. Using a person who was not involved in the development is a simple way to avoid negligence due to confidence in one's code and
negligence due to boredome which many developers feel as they would have exceuted most the test cases in the development/ UT process also.


For more discussion on this topic, check 

http://www.linkedin.com/answers/technology/software-development/TCH_SFT/250828-155544?browseIdx=27&sik=1238529999127&goback=.ama

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