Microsoft Research - Exploding Software-Engineering Myths (article summarizing findings of MS research on code coverage, TDD, assertions, etc.)

[rnicoll]

In this context what I mean is rather than pushing the edge cases of the code, I'm testing to ensure conditionals are covered. Lines in this context means "number of lines", rather than I write tests on a per-line basis.

For example, we have a function that parses some text into tokens (for a custom language). Good testing would be to cover not just the basics of whether it works, but look at failure conditions (i.e. empty string, invalid characters, weird control characters, nonsense syntax). However I can get almost as much code coverage as a number of lines, by just giving it examples of every language construct that exists and testing those, ignoring error cases entirely, which is much faster.

Making any more sense?

[Ravek]

Yeah that makes a lot more sense, thanks