· 2014
Coverage is not strongly correlated with test suite effectiveness
- 402citations
- 2014year
Short summary
Code coverage is a poor proxy for test suite effectiveness, as this study of 100 real-world Java projects found weak correlations, especially when accounting for test suite size.
AI-generated from the title and abstract; the full text is not read.
Key points
- Code coverage shows a weak correlation with test suite effectiveness in real-world software.
- The study analyzed 100 Java projects, addressing limitations of previous work on smaller or synthetic programs.
- Test suite size significantly confounds the relationship between coverage and effectiveness.
- Results suggest coverage is an unreliable proxy for fault detection.
AI-generated from the title and abstract; the full text is not read.
Abstract
The coverage of a test suite is often used as a proxy for its ability to detect faults. However, previous studies that investigated the correlation between code coverage and test suite effectiveness have failed to reach a consensus about the nature and strength of the relationship between these test suite characteristics. Moreover, many of the studies were done with small or synthetic programs, making it unclear whether their results generalize to larger programs, and some of the studies did not account for the confounding influence of test suite size. In addition, most of the studies were done with adequate suites, which are are rare in practice, so the results may not generalize to typical test suites.
The authors' abstract, as published at the source., 2014 · DOI ↗
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Field: Software
SoftwareComputer Science