Branch Coverage Testing in Software programming

In this example, the login page validation has three possible outcomes. When the login credentials are validated for the correctness, there rise three possible functional flows. Branch Coverage Testing is performed on each and every part of the code, where branching occurs.

These results provide evidence that branch coverage is not a good stopping criterion for random testing. They also show that branch coverage is not a good indicator for the effectiveness of a test suite. Generating object instances by invoking method sequences with captured object instances may not cover all branches.

Other types of Testing

If there is any discrepancy found, it simply means that functionality is defected and needs to be recoded to match the requirement created by the client or the Business Analyst. It is a quantitative measure of the code coverage of the program. But overall if you see, all the statements are being covered by both scenarios. So we can conclude that overall statement coverage is 100%. Analysis of a path coverage report is not an easy task as it requires deeper understanding of a particular design.

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In the branch testing, each outcome from a code module is tested as if the outcomes are binary, you need to test both True and False outcomes. Branch coverage and statement coverage is best depicted as far as to test necessities and coverage measure. The test necessities for branch coverage are the branches https://globalcloudteam.com/glossary/branch-coverage/ of the program. In simple words, the objective of this coverage is to execute the greater part of the branches in the program. On the other hand, coverage measure is characterized as per the number of branches executed by your test cases over the aggregate number of branches in the program.

1.1 Criteria

Otherwise, the system will not know how to respond during the unexpected negative functionality. For example, in a login page of an application, the user will enter the login id and respective https://globalcloudteam.com/ password. In cases like an incorrect or blank username along with a password, the application needs to tell the user what went wrong and ask them to correct the error that they made.

what is branch coverage in software testing

Non-functional requirements cover the non-functional aspects of the software, such as scalability and reliability. You can use techniques like load testing and stress testing to test these requirements. Modern business-critical website and app development is a succession of sprints requiring constant improvement.

How to Calculate Branch Coverage?

In Electronics Engineering from Sardar Patel University, India in 2003 and M.S in Electrical Engineering from NJIT, New Jersey in 2005. His practical engineering experience includes areas in Solid state electronics, Digital Designing and functional verification. He has worked in wide range of engineering positions that include FPGA Design Engineer, Applications Engineer and Product Manager. Non-functional tests cover aspects like performance and scalability. Compatibility testing is time-consuming and expensive, but it is valuable in ensuring that software works as intended in all platforms designed and for all users. A. It is a metric which is used to calculate and measure the percentage of test cases that have been executed.

what is branch coverage in software testing

First, the component removal allows for a more accurate observation of what level of statement coverage hardware monitoring alone can discover. Second, in most resource-constrained devices, no compiler or build tools are available on the system. Thus, this revision to THeME more precisely matches the statement coverage levels that could be observed on such devices. So what this relation means is that branch coverage is stronger than statement coverage, but also more expensive. In general, it’s more expensive to achieve branch coverage than to achieve statement coverage, because achieving branch coverage requires the generation of a larger number of test cases. If you are just starting with code coverage, it might be too challenging to invest in branch coverage immediately.

Code Example

Test coverage is also a requirement in part 6 of the automotive safety standard ISO Road Vehicles – Functional Safety. Assume this function is a part of some bigger program and this program was run with some test suite. Alternatively you can say that control statement IF has been evaluated both to TRUE and FALSE. Programming best practices suggest that a programmer provides such a method when writing a class.

what is branch coverage in software testing

The libquantum benchmark is an exception, but this is because the execution time of libquantum is only 0.15s. Thus, even a 0.01s increase in reported time appears significant. Can only achieve monitoring of unmodified code through the use of dynamic instrumentation, which is often significantly more expensive in terms of time and memory than static instrumentation. Modifications to the program under test, there is no code growth to the program, unlike in instrumentation. However, 100% coverage does not provide any guarantee of finding the problems in the code.

Code Coverage vs. Functional Coverage

That’s why there are many different methods of reporting this metric. All these methods focus on covering the most important combinations. It is very much similar to decision coverage, but it offers better sensitivity to control flow. This metric simply tells you the ratio of statements in an application that are currently under testing. Branch coverage, as we've seen, is about whether all branches—or paths of execution—in an application are under test. There are many test-related metrics with similar-sounding names.

  • The quality assessment is based on the probability of misclassification of the inferred model with respect to the expected outcomes of the different test cases of the high quality test plan.
  • To cover these edges, we have to traverse through "No" decision.
  • Decision coverage is stronger that statement coverage and it requires more test cases to achieve 100% decision coverage.
  • For example, if the outcomes are binary, you need to test both True and False outcomes.
  • Modifications to the program under test, there is no code growth to the program, unlike in instrumentation.

To ensure that all functional requirements are met, you can use boundary value analysis and equivalence partitioning techniques. B. It is a metric, which is used to calculate and measure the percentage of statements in the source code which have been executed. Fault injection may be necessary to ensure that all conditions and branches of exception-handling code have adequate coverage during testing. To measure what percentage of code has been executed by a test suite, one or more coverage criteria are used. These are usually defined as rules or requirements, which a test suite must satisfy.

Code coverage

On the other hand, coverage measure is defined accordingly as the number of branches executed by your test cases over the total number of branches in the program. Again, 71.5% statement coverage is covered, and altogether these two test cases executed all the possible paths with 71.5% statement coverage each. Let’s see branch code coverage in action with a simple code that uses an if statement. The True branch is covered or executed when the if condition evaluates to true.