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

SQLite is an extremely well-tested library, and you can extract all kinds of metrics from it.

As of version 3.6.14 (all statistics in the report are against that release of SQLite), the SQLite library consists of approximately 63.2 KSLOC of C code. (KSLOC means thousands of "Source Lines Of Code" or, in other words, lines of code excluding blank lines and comments.) By comparison, the project has 715 times as much test code and test scripts - 45261.5 KSLOC.

In the end, what always strikes me as the most significant is none of those possible metrics seem to be as important as the simple statement, "it meets all the requirements." (So don't lose sight of that goal in the process of achieving it.)

If you want something to judge a team's progress, then you have to lay down individual requirements. This gives you something to point to and say "this one's done, this one isn't". It's not linear (solving each requirement will require varying work), and the only way you can linearize it is if the problem has already been solved elsewhere (and thus you can quantize work per requirement).