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Sunday, March 22, 2009

Code coverage tools

So you have decided that you need to ensure that your software development cycle has code coverage, and want to move ahead. In addition to making sure that team members have awareness about the principles and about the methods used, another important decision is about the tools to use. There are a wide variety of tools that are available, and here is a listing of the tools. It is hard to recommend a tool, since the actual tool depends on the targets, depends on the developed language (C++, Python, Java, Web language, etc). Here is a sampling of some of the popular tools.

- LDRA Testbed: Automatic instrumentation techniques
- Cobertura: Cobertura is a free Java tool that calculates the percentage of code accessed by tests. It can be used to identify which parts of your Java program are lacking test coverage. It is based on jcoverage.
- Quilt: Quilt is a Java software development tool that measures coverage , the extent to which unit testing exercises the software under test. It is optimized for use with the JUnit unit test package, the Ant Java build facility, and the Maven project management toolkit.
- Clover: Commercial tool. Clover is designed to measure code coverage in a way that fits seamlessly with your current development environment and practices, whatever they may be. Clover's IDE Plugins provide developers with a way to quickly measure code coverage without having to leave the IDE. Clover's Ant and Maven integrations allow coverage measurement to be performed in Automated Build and Continuous Integration systems and reports generated to be shared by the team.
- NUnit: Meant for unit testing. NUnit is a unit-testing framework for all .Net languages. It is written entirely in C# and has been completely redesigned to take advantage of many .NET language features, for example custom attributes and other reflection related capabilities. NUnit brings xUnit to all .NET languages.
- NCover: Commercial tool. NCover 3 includes Symbol and Branch Point Coverage, but it also has two new metrics: Cyclomatic Complexity and Method Visit Coverage. Cyclomatic complexity describes the number of independent paths through your methods. It's a great indicator of when you should re-factor. Code with a low cyclomatic complexity will help you guarantee that new developers on your teams can get up to speed fairly quickly. While method visit coverage previously existed in NCover Explorer, it only worked when you had symbol points for a method.
- Jester: Jester finds code that is not covered by tests. Jester makes some change to your code, runs your tests, and if the tests pass Jester displays a message saying what it changed. Jester includes a script for generating web pages that show the changes made that did not cause the tests to fail.
- Emma: EMMA is an open-source toolkit for measuring and reporting Java code coverage. EMMA distinguishes itself from other tools by going after a unique feature combination: support for large-scale enterprise software development while keeping individual developer's work fast and iterative.
- Koalog Code Coverage: Commercial license. Koalog Code Coverage is a code coverage computation application written in the Java programming language. Koalog Code Coverage allows you to measure the efficiency of your tests suite, but also to discover dead code in your project.
- EclEmma: EclEmma is a free Java code coverage tool for Eclipse, available under the Eclipse Public License. Internally it is based on the great EMMA Java code coverage tool, trying to adopt EMMA's philosophy for the Eclipse workbench.
- GroboCodeCoverage: There are several commercially available code coverage tools for Java, but they all require a large fee to use. This is a 100% Pure Java implementation of a Code Coverage tool. It uses Jakarta's BCEL platform to post-compile class files to add logging statements for tracking coverage. An old tool.
- Hansel: Hansel is an extension to JUnit that adds code coverage testing to the testing framework. What makes Hansel different from other code coverage tools? Most tools try to generate code coverage reports from a test-run of all available tests. But a much more useful information is how much of the code which a test is supposed to test is covered. Hansel gives you this information.
- CodeCover: CodeCover is a free glass-box testing tool developed in 2007 at the University of Stuttgart. CodeCover measures statement, branch, loop, and MC/DC coverage. CodeCover uses the template engine Velocity.
- rcov: code coverage for Ruby: 20-300 times faster than previous tools. Multiple analysis modes: standard, bogo-profile, "intentional testing", dependency analysis. Detection of uncovered code introduced since the last run ("differential code coverage")
- Insure++: a coverage of source code of application tested with functional tests.
- iSYSTEM winIDEA: measures coverage on a wide variety of embedded processors. It works by recoding execution directly on hardware, without instrumenting code or modifying the program and in real-time.
- LDRA Testbed: Measures statement coverage, branch/decision coverage, LCSAJ Coverage, procedure/function call coverage, branch condition coverage, branch condition combination coverage and modified condition decision coverage (MC/DC) for DO-178B Level A.
- VB Watch: Visual Basic code coverage and performance analysis tool
- BullseyeCoverage: C and C++ code coverage tool
- XDebug: PHP debugging tool, including code coverage

If you know of more tools, please add in the comments.


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