Identifying characteristics of Java methods that may influence branch coverage: An exploratory study on open source projects

Abstract

Software testing is an important activity to assure the quality of software. Testing techniques and criteria have been created over time to help testers to devise high quality test suites. However, duly and systematically testing a software to reach high coverage on criteria, such as branch coverage, requires much effort. In this context, identifying characteristics of a software that may influence branch coverage is important to create software easier to test since the beginning. Therefore, the main purpose of this paper is to present an investigation conducted by us to identify the differences between methods whose branches were fully covered and the methods that have been partially covered. This investigation has been conducted on 39 open source Java projects.