Good software tries not to surprise the user. Today I was surprised that four of the integration tests in OpenFastTrace (OFT) failed, although I did not touch the code.

The failure reason given was a character encoding problem. Since I was quite sure that the problem did not occur last time I ran the test and I did not touch the code since, I knew the reason was not in our code.

When did I test enough?

While code coverage is a good indicator, you still have to know how code coverage works. Today I was hunting a bug in a Markdown importer I wrote for OpenFastTrace. The class where the bug sits had a whooping 93.1% code coverage and part of that missing coverage was owed to the fact that the JaCoCo coverage tracer can’t mark code that throws exceptions as covered – even though there is a test case for it.

When did I test enough?

While code coverage is a good indicator, you still have to know how code coverage works. Today I was hunting a bug in a Markdown importer I wrote for OpenFastTrace. The class where the bug sits had a whooping 93.1% code coverage and part of that missing coverage was owed to the fact that the JaCoCo coverage tracer can’t mark code that throws exceptions as covered – even though there is a test case for it.