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In software engineering, code coverage, also called test coverage, is a percentage measure of the degree to which the source code of a program is executed when a particular test suite is run. A program with high code coverage has more of its source code executed during testing, which suggests it has a lower chance of containing undetected software bugs compared to a program with low code coverage. Many different metrics can be used to calculate test coverage. Some of the most basic are the percentage of program subroutines and the percentage of program statements called during execution of the test suite.
Software testing is the act of checking whether software satisfies expectations.
In computer science, a control-flow graph (CFG) is a representation, using graph notation, of all paths that might be traversed through a program during its execution. The control-flow graph was conceived by Frances E. Allen, who noted that Reese T. Prosser used boolean connectivity matrices for flow analysis before.
In software engineering and development, a software metric is a standard of measure of a degree to which a software system or process possesses some property. Even if a metric is not a measurement, often the two terms are used as synonyms. Since quantitative measurements are essential in all sciences, there is a continuous effort by computer science practitioners and theoreticians to bring similar approaches to software development. The goal is obtaining objective, reproducible and quantifiable measurements, which may have numerous valuable applications in schedule and budget planning, cost estimation, quality assurance, testing, software debugging, software performance optimization, and optimal personnel task assignments.
In mathematics, particularly graph theory, and computer science, a directed acyclic graph (DAG) is a directed graph with no directed cycles. That is, it consists of vertices and edges, with each edge directed from one vertex to another, such that following those directions will never form a closed loop. A directed graph is a DAG if and only if it can be topologically ordered, by arranging the vertices as a linear ordering that is consistent with all edge directions. DAGs have numerous scientific and computational applications, ranging from biology to information science to computation (scheduling).
Graph drawing is an area of mathematics and computer science combining methods from geometric graph theory and information visualization to derive two-dimensional depictions of graphs arising from applications such as social network analysis, cartography, linguistics, and bioinformatics.
White-box testing is a method of software testing that tests internal structures or workings of an application, as opposed to its functionality. In white-box testing, an internal perspective of the system is used to design test cases. The tester chooses inputs to exercise paths through the code and determine the expected outputs. This is analogous to testing nodes in a circuit, e.g. in-circuit testing (ICT). White-box testing can be applied at the unit, integration and system levels of the software testing process. Although traditional testers tended to think of white-box testing as being done at the unit level, it is used for integration and system testing more frequently today. It can test paths within a unit, paths between units during integration, and between subsystems during a system–level test. Though this method of test design can uncover many errors or problems, it has the potential to miss unimplemented parts of the specification or missing requirements. Where white-box testing is design-driven, that is, driven exclusively by agreed specifications of how each component of software is required to behave, white-box test techniques can accomplish assessment for unimplemented or missing requirements.
Cyclomatic complexity is a software metric used to indicate the complexity of a program. It is a quantitative measure of the number of linearly independent paths through a program's source code. It was developed by Thomas J. McCabe, Sr. in 1976.
In the context of software engineering, software quality refers to two related but distinct notions:
In mathematics, and, in particular, in graph theory, a rooted graph is a graph in which one vertex has been distinguished as the root. Both directed and undirected versions of rooted graphs have been studied, and there are also variant definitions that allow multiple roots.
The structured program theorem, also called the Böhm–Jacopini theorem, is a result in programming language theory. It states that a class of control-flow graphs can compute any computable function if it combines subprograms in only three specific ways. These are
- Executing one subprogram, and then another subprogram (sequence)
- Executing one of two subprograms according to the value of a boolean expression (selection)
- Repeatedly executing a subprogram as long as a boolean expression is true (iteration)
Essential complexity is a numerical measure defined by Thomas J. McCabe, Sr., in his highly cited, 1976 paper better known for introducing cyclomatic complexity. McCabe defined essential complexity as the cyclomatic complexity of the reduced CFG after iteratively replacing (reducing) all structured programming control structures, i.e. those having a single entry point and a single exit point with placeholder single statements.
A decision-to-decision path, or DD-path, is a path of execution between two decisions. More recent versions of the concept also include the decisions themselves in their own DD-paths.
A plot is a graphical technique for representing a data set, usually as a graph showing the relationship between two or more variables. The plot can be drawn by hand or by a computer. In the past, sometimes mechanical or electronic plotters were used. Graphs are a visual representation of the relationship between variables, which are very useful for humans who can then quickly derive an understanding which may not have come from lists of values. Given a scale or ruler, graphs can also be used to read off the value of an unknown variable plotted as a function of a known one, but this can also be done with data presented in tabular form. Graphs of functions are used in mathematics, sciences, engineering, technology, finance, and other areas.
A Software Defect Indicator is a pattern that can be found in source code that is strongly correlated with a software defect, an error or omission in the source code of a computer program that may cause it to malfunction. When inspecting the source code of computer programs, it is not always possible to identify defects directly, but there are often patterns, sometimes called anti-patterns, indicating that defects are present.
NDepend is a static analysis tool for C# and .NET code to manage code quality and security. The tool proposes a large number of features, from CI/CD Web Reporting to Quality Gate and Dependencies Visualization. For that reason, the community refers to it as the "Swiss Army Knife" for .NET Developers.
Linear code sequence and jump (LCSAJ), in the broad sense, is a software analysis method used to identify structural units in code under test. Its primary use is with dynamic software analysis to help answer the question "How much testing is enough?". Dynamic software analysis is used to measure the quality and efficacy of software test data, where the quantification is performed in terms of structural units of the code under test. When used to quantify the structural units exercised by a given set of test data, dynamic analysis is also referred to as structural coverage analysis.
Software construction is a software engineering discipline. It is the detailed creation of working meaningful software through a combination of coding, verification, unit testing, integration testing, and debugging. It is linked to all the other software engineering disciplines, most strongly to software design and software testing.
JArchitect is a static analysis tool for Java code. This tool supports a large number of code metrics, allows for visualization of dependencies using directed graphs and dependency matrix. The tools also performs code base snapshots comparison, and validation of architectural and quality rules. User-defined rules can be written using LINQ queries. This possibility is named CQLinq. The tool also comes with a large number of predefined CQLinq code rules.
References
- ↑ Arthur H. Watson and Thomas J. McCabe (1996). "Structured Testing: A Testing Methodology Using the Cyclomatic Complexity Metric" (PDF). NIST Special Publication 500-235.
- ↑ Linda Westfall (2008). The Certified Software Quality Engineer Handbook. ASQ Quality Press. pp. 436–437. ISBN 978-0-87389-730-3.
- ↑ Y.N. Srikant; Priti Shankar (2002). The Compiler Design Handbook: Optimizations and Machine Code Generation. CRC Press. p. 249. ISBN 978-1-4200-4057-9.
- ↑ Robert V. Binder (2000). Testing Object-oriented Systems: Models, Patterns, and Tools . Addison-Wesley Professional. p. 378. ISBN 978-0-201-80938-1.
