Test Coverage Activity

Title	Automated testing and test coverage activity
Overview	Participants run the automated tests for a project, view the resulting coverage report, and interpret and understand the results in class.
Prerequisites	Have cloned and set up a development environment for a project.
Learning Objectives	After successfully completing this activity, the learner should be able to: Participant will be able to run a projects automated tests, review its coverage report, and understand their importance to a project.
Process Skills Practiced

Background

Automated tests, and test coverage results, are an important measure of code quality. They are also important for long term maintainability of code. This activity gives students the opportunity to run a project's automated tests, view its test coverage result, and properly interpret that number and its importance.

Directions

Instructor

Demonstrate how to run automated tests on a project and generate coverage data.

Students

1. [at home] Run its automated tests and view its coverage results.
2. [at home] Record the coverage results, and which files are least covered. Take a screen shot.
3. [in class] Report on their project and its coverage.
4. [in class] Discuss
   • How important it is (or isn't) to have 100% coverage and why?
   • What does the coverage number mean? How should one interpret it? What does it say about the code?
   • Imagine that you need to make a change to the code. What does the coverage number, and automated tests, mean to you as a developer?

Deliverables

A screen shot of the automated test results.

Assessment

A quick inspection that the students successfully ran the automated tests for the project.

Additional Information:

ACM BoK Area & Unit(s)	Software Engineering
ACM BoK Topic(s)	Testing and test coverage
Difficulty	Setting up and running a project can be medium to hard depending on the project. Running the tests is easy to medium depending on the project.
Estimated Time to Complete	Depending on the project and the number of automated tests it has, running the tests may take quite some time (hours). The discussion will probably be about 20 minutes.
Environment / Materials	Need an HFOSS project and its development enviornment set up.
Author(s)	Stoney Jackson
Source	Stoney Jackson
License	This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License

Suggestions for the Open Source Project:

Any project that uses an automated test framework that can produce coverage data. For example, on GitHub, a project that has a coverage badge in their REAME that displays what percent of the project is covered by tests would fit the bill. Here are a couple HFOSS projects that use automated tests. Most do.

• OpenMRS
• MouseTrap