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Blog Archive 2005-December 2005-November 2005-October 2005-September 2005-August 2005-July 2005-June

Mon, 22 Aug 2005

Java code coverage: Cobertura 1.6 released

I was fortunate enough to be involved with getting the JCoverage fork (called Cobertura) launched. Although my role was primarily managerial, not technical, I still enjoy watching it grow. SourceForge tells me that the project has nearly 250,000 "Project Web Hits". Today Mark Doliner and company (Grzegorz Lukasik, Jeremy Thomerson and others) released version 1.6 of Cobertura.

If you are writing tests, you need to know what code is being excercised and what code is being missed. A code coverage tool should be a part of your toolbox. If you've never used one before, you may be very surprised at what it shows you.

Here's a sample Cobertura report. The web site has sample Ant tasks to get you started quickly. Here are a few of the Cobertura features:

• Runs from Ant or the command line
• Instruments Java bytecode after it has been compiled
• Generates reports in HTML or XML
• Shows percent of lines coveraged and branches coveraged for each class, package, and for the overall project
• Shows the McCabe cyclomatic code complexity of each class, and the average cyclomatic code complexity for each package, and for the overall product
• Sorts HTML results by class name, percent of lines covered, percent of branches covered, etc in ascending or decending order

Of course the project is using CruiseControl, under multiple JDKs! See here.

If you're still not sure you want to tackle Java code coverage, read Measure test coverage with Cobertura by Elliotte Rusty Harold, an article on IBM's developerWorks site.

Enjoy!

Jared

posted at: 19:01 | path: | permanent link to this entry