Code coverage is a measure used in software testing. It describes the degree to which the source code of a program has been tested.
It is a form of testing that looks at the code directly and as such comes under the heading of white box testing. Currently, the use of code coverage is extended to the field of digital hardware, the contemporary design methodology of which relies on Hardware description languages (HDL's).
Code coverage techniques were amongst the first techniques invented for systematic software testing. The first published reference was by Miller and Maloney in Communications of the ACM in 1963.
