From: patrick-may@... (Patrick May)
Date: 2001-12-20T07:08:14+09:00
Subject: [ruby-talk:29009] Re: John Roth dolt (  Re: A challenge to proponents of Unit Testing. )

> Achieving 100% branch coverage is one of the exit criteria in almost
> all of the test design patterns presented in my book.  The additional
> exit criteria are pattern-specific, and determined by the test model
> and probable bugs of the implementation under test.  Achieving these
> exit criteria are what I consider to be adequate testing.

It sounds like coverage analysis could be an excellent addition to XP
practices.

The "magical" goal of XP coding techniques is to replace exponential
costs with constant costs.  Every idea in the code should be expressed
exactly twice: once in the code, once in the test.  Unfortunately,
writing tests is one of the more skillful areas of XP.  It's very easy
for programmers trying to change to test-first coding to slip in extra
functionality here and there.

Coverage analysis could be used as a heuristic (is that the right
word?) test for compliance with "Test First".  If the test suite
automatically runs the coverage analysis tool, then you could catch
some of these murky problems before leaning on the untested code.

~ Patrick May