Comparing multi-point stride coverage and dataflow coverage

Abstract

We introduce a family of coverage criteria, called Multi-Point Stride Coverage (MPSC). MPSC generalizes branch coverage to coverage of tuples of branches taken from the execution sequence of a program. We investigate its potential as a replacement for dataflow coverage, such as def-use coverage. We find that programs can be instrumented for MPSC easily, that the instrumentation usually incurs less overhead than that for def-use coverage, and that MPSC is comparable in usefulness to def-use in predicting test suite effectiveness. We also find that the space required to collect MPSC can be predicted from the number of branches in the program.