Today, the developer community is in a relatively good situation regarding the availability of high-quality code coverage tools. We'll only take a look at a few, but there are lots more out there -- most are for sale, but some are free or even open source.
First, let's start by looking at how code coverage measures are generally implemented.
To my knowledge, the implementations can be categorized into two distinct implementation approaches:
- Instrumentation
Instrumentation is all about manipulating the application code by injecting reporting code into strategic positions. In fact, the art of instrumentation has two schools: class instrumentation and source instrumentation. Not surprisingly, the difference is that class instrumentation injects the reporting code directly into compiled .class files while source instrumentation creates an intermediary version of the sources which are then compiled into the final, source-instrumented .class files. Most code coverage tools have chosen one of these two instrumentation techniques.
- Custom JVM
Another alternative to injecting reporting code to the bytecode is to move that responsibility into the JVM itself. Code coverage analysis could be implemented by having the virtual machine keep count of which parts of the loaded classes are executed. In practice, however, I haven't heard of any popular tools taking this approach.
