The Only Utility For Code Coverage
Several companies and governments set a minim for the code coverage, but does it make sense?
A few years ago, a colleague was working in a company developing a product. One day, their organization saw the possibility of licensing it to a government agency. The fit was almost perfect, except for one metric: the code coverage. I do not remember exactly the percentage, let's say 80%, but that government agency required that minimum of code coverage. The problem was that the software has a near to 0% code coverage.
The remarkable thing is that the product was working, working well, with several actual customers. Although it had almost no automatic tests, the quality of the code and the product was outstanding. But that was no sufficient for that government agency, the agency did not trust any proof except a number generated by a suite of tests. So, in order to proceed with the plan, they decided to increase the code coverage.
How do you increase the code coverage of an existing program? Just add tests that execute your code.
He explained how the whole process went. They started adding tests for the functionalities that they knew that were present. Day by day, the code coverage was…
