Video Interview: Code Coverage with Atlassian Clover
• Julian Simpson
How do you measure the success of your TDD efforts?
Evaluating the quality of a codebase can be difficult. A tasteful amount of emphasis on code coverage is a useful indicator though. Too little and it's too late to turn the oil tanker around. Too much and your developers focus on writing tests that provide line or block coverage, and not on providing value.
To do their bit,Atlassian have recently released version 2.5 of Clover, their code coverage tool. As well as doing classic code coverage, they've added some useful features:
- You can measure coverage across multiple Java VM's. This means that you can measure the code coverage that your functional tests give you.
- The tool can run just the tests that exercise the code you've changed, shrinking your build times.
On Tuesday I went to pub to meet Michael Studman, one of the Clover developers, and Atlassian's Man in London. We talked about what he's been doing with Clover and why you might want to use it for your Continuous Integration services. The gory detail is in the ten minute video [we're working on the transcription].