Before releasing any amount of code, developers usually test their work to tune performance and prove that the software works as intended. But often, validation is quite difficult, even if the application is simple.
Before releasing any amount of code, developers usually test their work to tune performance and prove that the software works as intended. But often, validation is quite difficult, even if the application is simple.
For example, the venerable Unix/Linux ls utility is conceptually quite simple, yet its many options and the myriad vagaries of the underlying file system make validating ls quite a challenge.
To help validate the operation of their code, developers often rely on test suites to either simulate or recreate operational scenarios. If the test suite is thorough, all of the features of the code can be exercised and be shown to work.
But how thorough is thorough? In theory, a completely thorough test suite would test all circumstances, validate all of the results, and exercise every single line of code, demonstrating that no code is “dead.” (As Stephen Friedl pointed out in last month’s column, dead code is a favorite hiding place for pesky bugs.) Validating results can be done in any number of ways since output is typically tangible in one form or another, but how do you make sure that all of your code was executed? Use GNU’s gcov.
Like an X-ray machine, gcov peers into your code and reports on its inner workings. And gcov is easy to use: simply compile your code with gcc and two extra options, and your code will automatically generate data that highlights statement-by-statement, run-time coverage. Best of all, gcov is…
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