Measuring the Effectiveness of Open Coverage Based Testing Tools

Abstract

The levels of quality, maintainability, testability, and stability of software can be improved and measured through the use of automated testing tools throughout the software development process. Automated testing tools assist software engineers to gauge the quality of software by automating the mechanical aspects of the software-testing task. Automated testing tools vary in their underlying approach, quality, and ease-of-use, among other characteristics In Software testing; Software Metrics provide information to support a quantitative managerial decision-making for the test managers. Among the various metrics, Code coverage metric is considered as the most important metric often used in analysis of software projects in the industries for testing, Code coverage analysis also helps in the testing process by finding the areas of a program not exercised by a set of test cases, creating additional test cases to increase coverage, and determine the quantitative measure of the code, which is an indirect measure of quality. The test manager needs coverage metric in making decisions while selecting test cases for regression testing. In literature there are a large number of automated tools to find the coverage of test cases in Java. Choosing an appropriate tool for the application to be tested may be a complicated process for the test Manager. To ease the job of the Test manager in selecting an appropriate tool, we propose a suite of objective metrics for measuring tool characteristics as an aid in systematically evaluating and selecting automated testing tools