My last post, Good code coverage: Necessity vs Sufficiency, about how you should maintain high code coverage with your automated tests, seems to have really struck a nerve in a small group of people -- I got some fantastic comments, with some great pointers. Michael Foord's comment, 'Too often "testing is no silver bullet" is used as an excuse not to test' hit the nail on the head, and Andrew Dalke linked to his excellent & detailed discussion with Glyph about code coverage, as well as pointing out the SQLite testing policy which is, frankly, astounding.

But I'm not writing this just to point out those links. No, this is partly in response to Ned Batchelder's plaintive question about why I picked on him. I picked on him because of his article's title: "there are flaws in coverage measurement." Now, Ned is the author of coverage, the main code coverage tool available for Python -- and I know he thinks code coverage is really important. And it is entirely legitimate to write critical essays about code coverage, especially statement coverage. But I also get frustrated with people who write blog posts with even moderately sensational and misrepresentative blog post titles. And that's why I included him in the post complaining about such things.

Got that? I hate sensational and misrepresentative titles.

Good day.

--titus

Legacy Comments

Posted by Steve Holden on 2009-02-22 at 10:19.

I couldn't agree with you more, as I wrote in my recent blog post
"Anyone Who Uses Anything But Python Should Be Shot".

Posted by Datablazer on 2009-02-22 at 10:36.

I don't get, in what way is is Ned's title "Flaws in coverage
measurement: sensationalist and/or misrepresentative?

Posted by Rene Dudfield on 2009-02-22 at 17:13.

Hey,    I think you need a pat, and some sunshine :)    Keep
sensationalist, and wrong headlines for the newspapers used to wrap up
fish and chips!      cu,

Posted by Tony Theodore on 2009-02-23 at 07:45.

OK, maybe I'm missing something. The title of this blog is fairly
"sensational", and surely you're not misrepresenting the SQLite
developers as idiots (since they don't have 100% coverage).

Posted by Alexander Limi on 2009-02-25 at 04:38.

**woosh**    That's the sound of a joke missed going over the previous
commenter's heads. ;)