A proposal for revisiting coverage testing metrics

Abstract

Test coverage information can be very useful for guiding testers in enhancing their test suites to exercise possible uncovered entities and in deciding when to stop testing. Since the concept of test criterion was born, several contributions have been made by both academia and industry in the definition and adaptation of adequacy criteria aiming at ensuring the discovery of more failures. Numerous contributions have also been done in the development of coverage tools. However, for complex applications that are reused in different contexts and for emerging paradigms (e.g., component-based development, service-oriented architecture, and cloud computing), traditional coverage metrics may no longer provide meaningful information to help testers on these tasks. Inspired by the idea of relative coverage this research focuses on the introduction of meaningful coverage metrics to cope with the challenges imposed by the current programming paradigms as well as on the definition of a theoretical framework for the development of relative coverage metrics.