Category: Incremental Design

Code coverage: a tool against unused and untested code

July 3, 2008 by Przemysław Bielicki

I'm an agile developer because I write my code incrementally i.e. only what I need today. I usually start writing the code by writing Unit Test - it really works and it really helps me understand what should be implemented and how system should behave (I will leave the subject of convincing people, who are new to unit testing, to do "write-test-first" for a separate post). OK - I usually do this but sometimes it's difficult or I'm just too impatient to see the result and start with the implementation and write unit test later. How do I know which packages/classes/methods are tested and which are "not touched" by any single unit test? How do I know that my code is really used somewhere by other parts of the developed system? This is the work for code coverage tool.