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The Impact Of Coverage On Bug Density In A Large Industrial Software Project, Thomas Bach, Artur Andrzejak, Ralf Pannemans, David Lo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Measuring quality of test suites is one of the major challenges of software testing. Code coverage identifies tested and untested parts of code and is frequently used to approximate test suite quality. Multiple previous studies have investigated the relationship between coverage ratio and test suite quality, without a clear consent in the results. In this work we study whether covered code contains a smaller number of future bugs than uncovered code (assuming appropriate scaling). If this correlation holds and bug density is lower in covered code, coverage can be regarded as a meaningful metric to estimate the adequacy of testing. …