Technical Report
 

How well do professional developers test with code coverage visualizations? An empirical study

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https://ir.library.oregonstate.edu/concern/technical_reports/2j62s628z

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  • "Code coverage visualizations using block coverage neither guided developers toward productive testing strategies, nor did these visualizations motivate developers to write more tests or help them find more faults than the control group. Nevertheless, code coverage visualizations did influence developers in a few important ways. Code coverage visualizations led developers to overestimate their test effectiveness more than the control group. Yet, these same visualizations reduced the variability in the number of test cases developers wrote by changing the standard developers used to evaluate their test effectiveness. Thus, the true power of testing visualizations lies not only with the faults that visualizations can highlight; it also lies in how visualizations can change how developers think about testing. Testing visualizations guide developers toward a particular standard of effectiveness, so if we want developers to test software adequately, we must ensure that the coverage criteria we choose to visualize leads developers toward a good standard of test effectiveness."--Conclusion
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