Why Statically Estimate Code Coverage is So Hard? A Report of Lessons Learned

Maurício F. Aniche, Gustavo A. Oliva, Marco A. Gerosa

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

Abstract

The calculation of test coverage is often unfeasible for large-scale mining software repositories studies, as its computation requires building each project and executing their test suites. Because of that, we have been working on heuristics to calculate code coverage based on static code analysis. However, our results have been disappointing so far. In this paper, we present our approach to the problem and an evaluation involving 18 open source projects (around 2,700 classes) from the Apache Software Foundation. Results show that our approach provides acceptable results for only 50% of all classes. We believe researchers can learn from our mistakes and possibly derive a better approach. We advise researchers who need to use code coverage in their studies to select projects with a well-defined build system, such as Maven.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publicationProceedings - 29th Brazilian Symposium on Software Engineering, SBES 2015
PublisherInstitute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc.
Pages185-190
Number of pages6
ISBN (Electronic)9781467392723
DOIs
StatePublished - Nov 11 2015
Externally publishedYes
Event29th Brazilian Symposium on Software Engineering, SBES 2015 - Belo Horizonte - MG, Brazil
Duration: Sep 21 2015Sep 25 2015

Publication series

NameProceedings - 29th Brazilian Symposium on Software Engineering, SBES 2015

Conference

Conference29th Brazilian Symposium on Software Engineering, SBES 2015
Country/TerritoryBrazil
CityBelo Horizonte - MG
Period9/21/159/25/15

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Software

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