A Review on Code Coverage Analysis

In Software testing; Software Metrics provide information to support a quantitative managerial decision-making for the test managers. Among the various metrics, Code coverage metric is considered as the most important metric often used in analysis of software projects in the industries for testing. Code coverage analysis helps in the testing process by finding the areas of a program not exercised by a set of test cases. It ensures that testing is effectively carried out without missing out all the key functional areas or the features of the software under development. If made available, the coverage information can be very useful for many other related activities, like, regression testing, test case prioritization, test-suite augmentation, test-suite minimization etc. This paper aims to provide an introduction to code coverage and describes how code coverage is performed. It also describes its potential usage and the challenges faced by industries in implementing code coverage. We hope our work will be helpful in software testing research.