Coverage – did we test the right things well enough?

Management asks if you’ve done testing. You say no, you need more time. How much more time? Why? Can you answer?

To develop an answer that stands up to scrutiny, we would need some measure of how wide, how tall, and how deep the space of the software was. However, from Chapter 1, we know that space is infinite.

Welcome to testing. As the saying goes, “Doing the impossible for the ungrateful.” To some extent, we can do the impossible – at least, it can be helpful to think that might be possible.

All test coverage is based on some model. All models are imperfect approximations of the actual work. As such, they have limits. In Chapter 2, we looked at one imprecise, metaphorical model – that of the software of a dog park. We used the test as a walk through that dog park. It is possible to think of various parts of the park as features and produce some measure of how well each feature...