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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] 12 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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

Formally? No, this is basically impossible by Rice's Theorem. There is not even a guarantee that if you have 100% test coverage, the program is good (the tests could be flawed).

This is just a natural limitation of turing completeness. You can't decide these properties while also having full computational power. In order to decide such things, you need a less powerful mode of computation (something not turing complete) that can be analyzed more thoroughly and with more guarantees.

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

That makes sense, thank you. Yes, it's specifically "test quality" I'm looking to measure, as 100% coverage is effectively meaningless if the tests are poor.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago

Yea I'm afraid the only real way to "measure" that is to read through the tests and the code and make a good ol human value judgement on the state of the code and tests. But it won't give you a number.