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.
Table Of Contents
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.
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.
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.
The 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.
Types of Test Coverage
There are many ways to consider test coverage. Let’s examine certain types of test coverage:
Code Coverage: It is the most popular metric for measuring test coverage for unit testing. The measurement can be broken down into different levels and depths, in terms of lines of code covered, decisions inside login constructors, among others. The criteria should be selected based on the criticality of the unit tested or how frequently it changes. Code coverage follows the white box approach and is very useful in adding new unit tests to cover code lines or branches.
Data-Oriented Coverage: It mainly emphasizes on the input and output parameters with a different spectrum of possible values they can have. In data-oriented coverage, we can go for “each choice” coverage wherein we choose each possible value at least once.
Popular Methods of Covering Tests
These are some of the popular methods of covering tests:
- Shuffling of resources: Moving the task from one set of testers to another set might help discover minor bugs in the application.
- Compatibility coverage: Checking the compatibility of the application with multiple browsers and devices.
- Ownership: Make sure that the developers and QAs are accountable for their tasks and take ownership of what they worked on.
- Deadline: Set a clear deadline for every task so everyone in the team knows the timeline.
- Communication: Establish an efficient way of communicating among team members and across teams through emails or task-tracking tools.
- Maintain an RTM: Use RTM and similar techniques to plan the timely release of your application
How to Calculate Test Coverage?
Test coverage is the measure of the proportion of a programming exercise during automation testing and it gives an objective score.
The tool measuring test coverage will monitor the code during a test suite run. The tool will attempt to check that each written line of code is called at least once during the test suite run. And this is logical – since a line that has not been called during a test suite run is effectively untested.
To calculate test coverage, you need two things:
- The total lines of code in the piece of software quality you are testing (X)
- The number of lines of code all test cases currently execute (Y)
Test Coverage % = X/Y * 100
Example:
Suppose the total number of lines of code in a piece of software is 1000 and the number of lines executed across all existing test cases is 100, then your test coverage percentage comes out to be:
(100/1000) * 100 = 10%
Code coverage can tell you how much of your code is covered by tests but it does not tell you much about the quality of the tests. When you are tracking the percentage of your code ran by your tests, the measurements of code coverage are reliable but it doesn’t tell you anything regarding the value of those tests. So code coverage on its own is not a good indicator of code quality.
A possible question would be as to what is generally accepted as sufficient test coverage when measuring the number of lines of code executed and does this metric work?
There are two parts in which we can ensure almost 100% test coverage:
- Good test case
- Adequate test coverage
A good test case captures the requirement fulfilment, you have to ensure during requirement traceability is to add good test cases, so it should be like test coverage by requirements.
Automation Testing Coverage: Few Examples
The meaning of test coverage can be different in different contexts such as product coverage, risk coverage, requirements coverage, etc. Let’s understand these with some examples.
Product Coverage:
If automation testing coverage is measured in terms of the product, the main focus should be on the areas of product which have been tested and those that remain untested.
Example:
If you are testing “scissors”, you won’t be just focusing on whether it cuts a paper properly or not, but there are other aspects to look at such as User Handlingwhether the user can handle it comfortably or not.
If you ignore the other aspects of a product, you can’t claim that the automation testing coverage is complete for the product.
Cross Browser Test Coverage
One more test coverage which is equally important is the browser’s coverage. Below are a few points we have to ensure initially:
- Are mobile devices included in the release?
- What are the Operating Systems, screen sizes?
- How web applications interact with the operating systems and browsers?
- Test environment, context?
There is one way to execute and cover the test criteria is that execute critical test cases on all browsers and operating systems and then run the less risk test cases on different browsers. In this method in the end, we don’t have any clear picture of test results but it can be improved after following multiple test cycles. But if there is limited time then maybe this methodology fails because at multiple test cases run consumes a lot of time.
There is another to do it wisely is to divide the sprint days and prioritise the browsers according to the below table:
| Suite | Day1 {IE, CH, FF} | Day2 {IE, CH, FF} | Day3{IE, CH, FF} |
| Suite-1 | IE | CH | FF |
| Suite-2 | CH | FF | IE |
| Suite-3 | FF | IE | CH |
So through this method at the end of the sprint, you can cover each browser and cover maximum test coverage.
Requirements Coverage:
If you have developed an awesome application but it’s not aligned with the customer’s requirements, then it is just crap.
Example:
If you are testing a chat application and you have covered everything from two users chatting independently to multiple users chatting in a group. But you forgot a key point mentioned in the requirement document that when two users chat independently, a video call option will be enabled.
Test Coverage Techniques
Multiple test coverage techniques help to attain high testing areas.
- Specification-based test coverage: This deals with following the specification documents to cover maximum tests for the code.
- Structure-based test coverage: This refers to understanding the structure of the code/application and writing tests that cover the maximum areas of the code.
- Experience-based test coverage: It is based on the tester’s skill, knowledge, and experience with the code.
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.
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.
