What can be alternative metrics to code coverage?

Question

Code coverage is propably the most controversial code metric. Some say, you have to reach 80% code coverage, other say, it\'s superficial and does not say anything about your te

Answer 1

Code Coverage is just an indicator and helps pointing out lines which are not executed at all in your tests, which is quite interesting. If you reach 80% code coverage or so, it starts making sense to look at the remaining 20% of lines to identify if you are missing some use case. If you see "aha, this line gets executed if I pass an empty vector" then you can actually write a test which passes an empty vector.

As an alternative I can think of, if you have a specs document with Use Cases and Functional Requirements, you should map the unit tests to them and see how many UC are covered by FR (of course it should be 100%) and how many FR are covered by UT (again, it should be 100%).

If you don't have specs, who cares? Anything that happens will be ok :)