New Article on Path vs Branch vs Code Coverage

Every so often we come across people who talk about code coverage. It's been around for a long time, but not many understand the primary types of coverage and the differences between them.

We posted a new article on the differences and benefits of path, branch and code coverage, available here.

You can also look at Bullseye - they have a nice list of coverage techniques as well.

JUnit 4 Resources

Came across a blog that contains some JUnit 4 references, including those from Codign Software :)

Something About J: Some Useful JUnit 4 Links

Eclipse DTP JUnit and Coverage Assessment

With any startup, one of the most important factors in mental well-being is the feedback we receive from our users. Good, bad or ugly, we need it – its more important than getting a purchase order. Really, it’s the silence that kills us.

That said, we are pleased to get some great feedback from the folks working on the Eclipse DTP project. DTP is a top level project so it gets lots of attention. The project is run by John Graham, chair of the Project Management Committee for the Dataools Platform, and I have had the opportunity of meeting John at a couple of Eclipse events. I also met a number of other DTP committers and am impressed with not only their knowledge but with their passion. These guys like unit testing.

We not only donated CoView to DTP, but also our time to help them out. Being given a free product is great but unless you have time to use it, it becomes shelfware. Our goal, worked out with DTP, was to help them analyze their existing path coverage and create additional JUnit tests to increase that coverage. It took one of our engineers 6 hours to complete the process. He analyzed their current path coverage and added 40 additional JUnit tests using CoView. The overall cost was $288. Overall increase in coverage: 46% increase in path coverage, 22% increase in branch coverage. A detailed case study is also available. DTP also gave us some great feedback during the whole process, and we certainly appreciate it.

Thanks to DTP for letting us gather this information, and great job on releasing your latest version.