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100% code coverage is near-meaningless - but is there a good measure to use? (feddit.uk)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/programming

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Is there some formal way(s) of quantifying potential flaws, or risk, and ensuring there's sufficient spread of tests to cover them? Perhaps using some kind of complexity measure? Or a risk assessment of some kind?

Experience tells me I need to be extra careful around certain things - user input, code generation, anything with a publicly exposed surface, third-party libraries/services, financial data, personal information (especially of minors), batch data manipulation/migration, and so on.

But is there any accepted means of formally measuring a system and ensuring that some level of test quality exists?

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[–] [email protected] 20 points 1 year ago (2 children)

80%. Much beyond that and you get into a decreasing return on the investment of making the tests.

[–] canpolat 11 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

I think this is a good rule-of-thumb in general. But I think the best way to decide on the correct coverage is to go through uncovered code and make a conscious decision about it. In some classes it may be OK to have 30%, in others one wants to go all the way up to 100%. That's why I'm against having a coverage percentage as a build/deployment gate.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago

Bingo, exactly this. I said 80 because that's typically what I see our projects get to after writing actually useful tests. But if your coverage is 80% and it's all just tests verifying that a constant is still set to whatever value, then yeah, thats a useless metric.

[–] Psilves1 1 points 1 year ago

God I fucking wish my projects were like this

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

The 80-20 rule is for everything. Don’t waste 80% of effort to get that last 20% of coverage.