A survey of coverage based testing tools

Qian Yang, J. Jenny Li, David Weiss

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

45 Scopus citations

Abstract

Test coverage is sometimes used as a way to measure how thoroughly software is tested. Coverage is used by software developers and sometimes by vendors to indicate their confidence in the readiness of their software. This survey studies and compares 17 coverage-based testing tools focusing on, but not restricted to coverage measurement. We also survey additional features, including program prioritization for testing, assistance in debugging, automatic generation of test cases, and customization of test reports. Such features make tools more useful and practical, especially for large-scale, real-life commercial software applications. Our initial motivations were both to understand the available test coverage tools and to compare them to a tool that we have developed, called eXVantage1 (a tool suite that includes code coverage testing, debugging, performance profiling, and reporting). Our study shows that each tool has its unique features tailored to its application domains. Therefore this study can be used to pick the right coverage testing tools depending on various requirements.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationProceedings of the 2006 International Workshop on Automation of Software Test, AST '06, Co-located with the 28th International Conference on Software Engineering, ICSE 2006
Pages99-103
Number of pages5
DOIs
StatePublished - 2006
Event1st International Workshop on Automation of Software Test, AST'06, Co-located with the 28th International Conference on Software Engineering, ICSE 2009 - Shanghai, China
Duration: 20 May 200628 May 2006

Publication series

NameProceedings - International Conference on Software Engineering
ISSN (Print)0270-5257

Conference

Conference1st International Workshop on Automation of Software Test, AST'06, Co-located with the 28th International Conference on Software Engineering, ICSE 2009
Country/TerritoryChina
CityShanghai
Period20/05/0628/05/06

Keywords

  • automate test case generation
  • code coverage
  • coverage-based testing tool
  • dominator analysis
  • eXVantage
  • prioritization

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