How Do You Ensure Test Coverage?

Software development is more systematic today. Organizations are seeking measures to test the effectiveness and completeness of the software. Test coverage is the most valuable of them all. Test Coverage is a technique that measures the amount of automation testing that is performed by a set of tests (or test suites). It helps monitor the quality of automation testing and assists the testers in creating tests that cover all the untested missing areas.

What is Test Coverage?

Test coverage is the measurement of testing performed by a set of tests. It quantifies the areas in which a collection of test cases has been tested. Test coverage includes collecting information to determine which program parts are executed using a test suite to determine which conditional statements have been taken branches. Basically, it is a way of ensuring that you are testing your code and determining how much area of the code a certain set of test plans covers.

Read here about Test Automation Coverage

Why is Test Coverage Important?

• It gives information about the covered and uncovered area of automation testing.
• Test coverage helps to make a decision about the quality of the product.
• It tells the QA tester which all test cases have been executed and which are not.
• Helps to create additional test cases to increase coverage.
• Identify meaningless test cases which have no role in increasing the coverage.
• Identify a quantitative measure of test coverage to ensure quality checks.
• Helps to meet the exit criteria.
• Helps to keep time, scope, and cost under control.
• Prevents defects at an early stage of the project lifecycle.
• Help easily find gaps in requirements and test cases at the unit and code level.
• Allows to count features and measure them against several tests.

Benefits of Test Coverage

Test coverage is useful in implementing numerous testing approaches and plans. Here are some of the ways test coverage is beneficial:

• It helps determine which parts of the code have been changed/modified.
• It ensures checking the right areas of the code and highlights issues in those particular areas.
• Test coverage improves the overall quality of the application as it covers a maximum amount of code.
• This process helps in identifying and preventing defects early in the SDLC lifecycle.
• It is easy to uncover gaps in requirements, test cases, and problems at the unit and code levels using test coverage techniques.
• It assists in identifying untested pathways in your application that enhance its usability.
• You can manage testing time, cost, and scope if you properly design and use the test coverage process.
• If you use testing tools, you can easily scale your test coverage.

You can do both functional and non-functional activities. Still, in most cases, the coverage calculations are as per the functional requirements only, as the most important objective of an application is to follow the specification requirements.

Test coverage helps in defining certain parts of the software to cover them with tests. Although it’s a great measuring strategy, even with 100% test coverage, you can’t be certain that your application is 100% bug-free. The ideal amount of test coverage should be based on the automation testing requirements and risk analysis.

How do you Ensure Test Coverage to Achieve Maximum?

• Capture all the project related requirements at an early stage
• Identify the critical requirements more accurately by having all the information on the differences between the current release of a product/app and the previous one to maximize positive coverage
• Capture the critical test cases as early as possible
• Prioritize the requirements and focus on areas which are of high importance
• Adapt to test automation and use test management tools
• Take an estimation effort in the execution of the test cases
• Make your best resources work on the critical tasks and let new testers explore more from a fresh perspective
• Include the developers as well in the process of writing automation tests
• QAs  and BAs should perform the prioritization of the backlog tasks
• Always maintain a checklist for all the tasks and activities
• Interact more with your Dev team to get application behaviour insights
• Keep track of your build cycles and bug fixes
• Implement the continuous integration so that you can focus on better stability at the later stages as it’s done through the continuous integration for regularly integrating code changes into a shared code repository. Each commit triggers a build during which tests are run that help to identify if anything was broken by the changes.

Read here- How to Improve Automation Test Coverage with Testsigma?

By understanding automation testing coverage and considering these techniques and with automation as a part of the automation testing strategy, and applying long term coverage criteria, testers can maximize and optimize their test coverage over time. We need to focus on those test coverage criteria that best suit our needs. Testsigma offers comprehensive solutions that can help automate all the complex automation testing activities. Start using it today to fast track your automation testing at the speed of Agile.

Frequently Asked Questions

How do you ensure better code coverage?

You can ensure code coverage by following its techniques and calculating how many lines of code your tests cover. Writing more test cases, using testing tools to run the tests, and removing redundancies are some of the ways to ensure good code coverage.

How can I improve my test coverage code?

You can improve your test coverage code by following the test coverage techniques and implementing tools that support such methods. Even writing and executing sophisticated test cases with the ability scale to cover more code for testing can improve your test coverage code.

What is a test coverage plan?

Test coverage plan refers to the overall test plan that shows the areas being covered for testing. It helps monitor the quality of testing using just the test plan.