Coverage Testing in a Production Software Development Environment
Kent Bortz · ePublications at Regis University (Regis University) · 2006
This project proposes that current testing methodologies used by standard testing tools are not sufficient to ensure sufficient test coverage. Test tools provide important and irreplaceable test data but are not capable of guaranteeing high percentage of path exposure (coverage). If the code path includes loop statements like, "if" or "when" then the number of paths to test grows exponentially. The growth of the code path becomes exponential when nested decision statements are considered. The most common methodology used in today's testing environment verifies each line of code but does not verify all path combination. Testing per line of code can not guarantee complete test coverage when considering the variations of nested code paths. The result of lower coverage is a higher field defect rate that increases the overall product support costs.