11.3 Coverage

By its nature, testing is never complete. As the influential computer scientist Edsger Dijkstra put it, “Testing shows the presence, not the absence of bugs.” No quantity of tests can ever prove a package free of bugs. At best, they increase our confidence that the package works well in a wide range of important scenarios.

The degree to which a test suite exercises the package under test is called the test’s coverage. Coverage can’t be quantified directly—the dynamics of all but the most trivial programs are beyond precise measurement—but there are heuristics that can help us direct our testing efforts to where they are more likely to be useful.

Statement coverage is the simplest and most widely used of these heuristics. ...

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