A survey of coverage based testing tools

Test coverage is sometimes used as a way to measure how thoroughly software is tested. Coverage is used by software developers and sometimes by vendors to indicate their confidence in the readiness of their software. This survey studies and compares 17 coverage-based testing tools focusing on, but not restricted to coverage measurement. We also survey additional features, including program prioritization for testing, assistance in debugging, automatic generation of test cases, and customization of test reports. Such features make tools more useful and practical, especially for large-scale, real-life commercial software applications. Our initial motivations were both to understand the available test coverage tools and to compare them to a tool that we have developed, called eXVantage1 (a tool suite that includes code coverage testing, debugging, performance profiling, and reporting). Our study shows that each tool has its unique features tailored to its application domains. Therefore this study can be used to pick the right coverage testing tools depending on various requirements.