
Is Code Coverage Irrelevant? - ingve
http://ronjeffries.com/articles/015-11/coverage/
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dalke
Coverage testing is one of the more maligned techniques out there. It's one of
my go-to tools. Once I have a test suite I think is robust, I'll go through
the code again with a coverage tool, which will usually identify error paths I
didn't exercise and keep me honest. For examples, a code refactor might have
introduced new error cases which weren't needed in the old code, and some code
- like cleanup handling around ^C handling - is not worth fully automating;
code coverage will help spot where manual tests are needed.

But I really wanted to comment about one of the comments described in this
essay:

> One respondent seemed to conclude that the team who had 95% coverage [vs.
> 45%] clearly didn’t understand TDD and therefore they’d look in that program
> for defects.

The original TDD proponents were very enthusiastic that TDD would lead to high
coverage. For example, Beck wrote "TDD followed religiously should result in
100% statement coverage." I think it's safe to say that Beck understands TDD.

