What is code coverage and how do YOU measure it?

Code coverage is a measurement of how many lines/blocks/arcs of your code are executed while the automated tests are running.

Code coverage is collected by using a specialized tool to instrument the binaries to add tracing calls and run a full set of automated tests against the instrumented product. A good tool will give you not only the percentage of the code that is executed, but also will allow you to drill into the data and see exactly which lines of code were executed during a particular test.

Our team uses Magellan - an in-house set of code coverage tools. If you are a .NET shop, Visual Studio has integrated tools to collect code coverage. You can also roll some custom tools, like this article describes.

If you are a C++ shop, Intel has some tools that run for Windows and Linux, though I haven't used them. I've also heard there's the gcov tool for GCC, but I don't know anything about it and can't give you a link.

As to how we use it - code coverage is one of our exit criteria for each milestone. We have actually three code coverage metrics - coverage from unit tests (from the development team), scenario tests (from the test team) and combined coverage.

BTW, while code coverage is a good metric of how much testing you are doing, it is not necessarily a good metric of how well you are testing your product. There are other metrics you should use along with code coverage to ensure the quality.

Code coverage basically tells you how much of your code is covered under tests. For example, if you have 90% code coverage, it means 10% of the code is not covered under tests.

I know you might be thinking that if 90% of the code is covered, it's good enough, but you have to look from a different angle. What is stopping you from getting 100% code coverage?

A good example will be this:

if(customer.IsOldCustomer()) 
{
}
else 
{
}

Now, in the code above, there are two paths/branches. If you are always hitting the "YES" branch, you are not covering the "else" part and it will be shown in the Code Coverage results. This is good because now you know that what is not covered and you can write a test to cover the "else" part. If there was no code coverage, you are just sitting on a time bomb, waiting to explode.

NCover is a good tool to measure code coverage.