During the last week, I had two discussions about code coverage. Code coverage is the metric of how many lines of code are covered by your automated test suite. Many test frameworks have built-in ways to measure this. Other times you have to install another tool manually. When you run your tests you then see how many lines are not covered by a test. That means that no test was run where this line of code was evaluated or executed or interpreted.

When you reach 100% code coverage, what then? Are you done? Could you guarantee that there are absolutely no bugs in your code?

If you are tempted to say Yes, or “maybe?" then let me tell you that you are wrong.

Consider this piece of code.

If you write a unit test for this method, the line eval... will be interpreted because of the if emergency at the end. The line is thus covered. But the code is not covered or tested.

Admittedly, this is a very trivial example that I made up. In reality, there are some more profound things to consider.

If you have complex conditionals you might need a logic table where you compare all possible combinations of the atomic parts of the conditional.

You cannot possibly evaluate this in your head and know whether you checked for every possible, sensible combination. Yet when you cover that line you are at 100% coverage and can go home, right?

So what do you do? Let’s look at this tomorrow.