from
The Free On-line Dictionary of Computing (8 July 2008)
Test coverage
<testing> A measure of the proportion of a program exercised
by a {test suite}, usually expressed as a percentage. This
will typically involve collecting information about which
parts of a program are actually executed when running the test
suite in order to identify which branches of {conditional
statements} which have been taken.
The most basic level of test coverage is {code coverage
testing} and the most methodical is {path coverage testing}.
Some intermediate levels of test coverage exist, but are
rarely used.
The standard {Unix} tool for measuring test coverage is
{tcov}, which annotates {C} or {Fortran} source with the
results of a test coverage analysis. {GCT} is a {GNU}
equivalent.
(2001-05-20)