1 On the road to LectroTest 1.0: testing and code coverage {anchor:On the road to LectroTest 1.0: testing and code coverage} In preparation for a big release, I spent quite a few hours beefing up the test suite for [LectroTest]. I added 41 new tests, an increase of 16 percent. Some of the tests were tricky to write, and I spent way more than 16 percent of my testing effort on these last few tests. But the results of the effort were worth it: 100 percent coverage. According to the Perl code-coverage tool {link:Devel::Cover|http://search.cpan.org/dist/Devel-Cover/}, the tests in the suite now cover 100 percent of LT's statements, branches, conditions, and subroutines. I sure do like seeing green on the summary report. {image:coverage-summary.png|coverage summary report} The new tests uncovered one obscure bug, which I fixed. They also uncovered some crufty code that I should have cleaned up earlier and had forgotten. Now the cruft is gone. In a few places I had to refactor the code to eliminate impossible conditions that were throwing off the coverage report. For example, consider the code below, in particular the portion in bold face. {code:none} if ($content && __s/(.*)/binding($1)/es__) { $content .= " $1"; } {code} The coverage tool indicated that I was not testing the case in which the regex op in the second part of the ~~if~~ condition fails to match. The reason, of course, is because it cannot fail; the regex (.*) always matches. So I rewrote the code to remove the regex op from the condition: {code:none} if ($content) { __s/(.*)/binding($1)/es;__ $content .= " $1"; } {code} Problem solved. For the most part, however, when Devel::Cover said that there were holes in my testing, they were real holes. Having filled those holes, I now have the confidence in [LectroTest] that I need to feel comfortable about recommending its widespread use. And that's step one on the road to a big 1.0 release. 2005-02-19 12:33:59.904 2005-02-19 12:33:49.607 Sat Feb 19 12:33:59 EST 2005