An empirical evaluation to study benefits of visual versus textual test coverage information

Authors:
Vahid Garousi;Negar Koochakzadeh
Affiliations:
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Calgary, Canada;Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Calgary, Canada
Venue:
TAIC PART'10 Proceedings of the 5th international academic and industrial conference on Testing - practice and research techniques
Year:
2010

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Abstract

The code coverage tools (e.g., CodeCover for Java) and the textual coverage information (e.g., only metric values) they produce are very useful for testers. However with increasing size and complexity of code bases of both systems under test and also their automated test suites (e.g., based on JUnit), there is a need for visualization techniques to enable testers to analyze code coverage in higher levels of abstraction. To address the above need, we recently proposed a test coverage visualization tool. To assess the usability, effectiveness and usefulness of this tool in unit testing and test maintenance tasks, we have conducted a controlled experiment, the results of which show that the tool can benefit testers more compared to textual coverage information.