What is the code-coverage percentage on your project?

Question

What is the % code-coverage on your project? I\'m curious as to reasons why.

Is the dev team happy with it? If not, what stands in the way from increasing it?

Answer 1

I often use code coverage under our automated test suite, but primarily to look for untested areas. We get about 70% coverage most of the time, and will never hit 100% for two reasons;

1) We typically automate new functionality after the release which is manually tested for it's first release and hence not included in coverage analysis. Automation is primarily for functional regression in our case and is the best place to execute and tweak code coverage.

2) Fault injection is required to get 100% coverage, as you need to get inside execption handlers. This is difficult and time consuming to automate. We don't currently do this and hence won't ever get 100%. Jame's Whittakers books on breaking software cover this subject well for anyone interested.

It is also worth remembering that code coverage does not equate to test coverage, as is regularly discussed in threads such as this and this over on SQAforums. Thus 100% code coverage can be a mis-leading metric.