A lot of efforts are plugged in, day in and day out, for dot net application development. Every team puts in their heart and soul when it comes to code, coverage and testing, just to ensure that it is good. Some might be doing it individually, while for others it is teamwork, a team consisting of developers, headed by managers and quality assurance team mates.
They all strive, to put the code together and then, to know whether it is good enough or not. Writing tests to prove that the code is good and then utilizing coverage tools to showcase that they have strong test parameters and preparing case studies based on it, is a standard process which everyone follows across the globe. Google recently allowed everyone to have a look at the back drop to code coverage activity and its team-wide effects across the organization.
Let's revisit a few of the trends observed on how some of the .Net development organizations, with enhanced performance, operate.
Project Discussions and Approval Sessions with clients gives an insight into the challenges encountered with several vendors and what part of the services or best practices they would want their vendors to replicate for them.
Quality has To Be "The" Culture and is so at all these leading Dot net developments hubs. It is not phraseology or a lingo for them; neither is it just a department. Instead it's their culture to keep on asking themselves, "How do we perceive that our code is good?
Great or Good Code is Not a Matter of Hope it's a matter of designing, testing and delivering dot net applications.
However; efforts alone cannot guarantee success to any written code. What top organizations do differently is, they follow the thumb rule "Good code is always measureable", and they have been adapting this concept across functions, in the entire organization.
"Teams Deliver, whereas Individuals Contribute" is one more virtue, which top organizations have cultivated. Individuals are really important however; at the end of day it is the team work and their ability to work and deliver great applications together, is what matters. These teams - or rather the team members, consistently look for feedback along the entire development stream that will help them understand areas of improvement instantaneously and redirect their resources accordingly.
These results/findings are then shared across the team to ensure that each team and individual on the team actively redirects the limited time and resources to be effective. It's an entire convoy that reaches out to a unified management goal of delivering good code for great applications.
Development team members promise some or the other types of testing, a process that gives the confidence about the code, to be comprehensive and competitive. These organizations follow one thing as BIBLE "it is not important, how many tests are written or how long these tests are run, the important aspect is "do those tests fully deploy or exploit the entire code base?"
Truly speaking this is only half work done...as code coverage is the master stroke that every software development company should play in order to gain that confidence in the tests and ts results.
3 Code Coverage Metrics
Branch Coverage
- To measure success, it refers to percentage of separate code segments, or branches, that are covered during the testing of the application.
- The goals vary across organizations but, typically the target ranges usually across 80-90 percent.
- Attention seeking aspect here is that each added enhancement in branch coverage typically requires enhanced efforts.
Sequence Point Coverage
- If branch coverage tells how to "measure" success, sequence point coverage is how to "achieve" success
- Its prime purpose is to help developers assess how to enhance overall branch coverage.
- It refers to the percentage of sequence points and/or actual lines of code, which are covered during application testing.
- Upon using it along with source code highlighting, sequence point coverage allows prompt identification of areas with added testing requirements.
Change Risk Anti-pattern Coverage
- Branch coverage is how to "measure" success, Sequence point coverage is how to "achieve" success, & Change risk anti-pattern portrays how to "mitigate risk" or "barriers in achieving success."
- It is a renowned industry metric & it comprehends uncovered code against the complexity of that code.
- It offers a synopsis of how risky an overall code may be; depending on its complexity.
- Modularity and readability, to reduce the overall risk of the code, will lead developers to keep down their change risk anti-patterns score.
Regardless of any code coverage metric, that an organization follows, what has been observed time and over again is that incorporating code coverage to entire development process - a team based effort, will offer significant results in form of enhanced confidence, diminished bugs and overall improvisation in the code quality.
Chirag Shivalker is Head of Content Team at Crispy Codes. With a decade-long experience in technology writing and trend analysis Chirag is an expert in technology and technological trends along with business writing.
