Software-Coverage Test Tool Tracks Execution Paths

Dec. 18, 2000

Most software-coverage tools check whether a particular statement has been executed. McCabe Test from McCabe & Associates takes coverage testing a step further by tracking execution paths as well. This distinction is important because 100% code...

William G. Wong

Conventional code-coverage tools track whether a statement has been executed during a particular run. They also often indicate how many times a particular statement has been executed, providing one approach to performance analysis. Yet many conditional statements and multibranch statements are complex. And, it's possible that a particular piece of code will be executed using more than one path.

This tool records which paths are executed. Developers can know the percentage of all paths that have been tested. It also details which paths have been tested, and it performs a syntactic analysis of an application to determine paths. It instruments code for obtaining runtime results, so the usual testing procedures can be applied to the application. The tool can merge test results to determine path coverage for all tests.

McCabe Test runs on a variety of platforms, including Windows 9x, Windows NT, Solaris, HPUX, AIX, and IRIX. It supports Ada, C, C++, COBOL, FORTRAN, Java, and Visual Basic applications. Contact the company for pricing and licensing details.

McCabe & Associates Inc., 9861 Broken Land Pkwy., Columbia, MD 21046; (800) 638-6316; www.mccabe.com.

About the Author

William G. Wong | Senior Content Director - Electronic Design and Microwaves & RF

I am Editor of Electronic Design focusing on embedded, software, and systems. As Senior Content Director, I also manage Microwaves & RF and I work with a great team of editors to provide engineers, programmers, developers and technical managers with interesting and useful articles and videos on a regular basis. Check out our free newsletters to see the latest content.

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I earned a Bachelor of Electrical Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology and a Masters in Computer Science from Rutgers University. I still do a bit of programming using everything from C and C++ to Rust and Ada/SPARK. I do a bit of PHP programming for Drupal websites. I have posted a few Drupal modules.

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