Coverage

Coverage is tricky. You think you got everything covered, and then, WHAM!! A bug suddenly appears. You’re forced to defend your testing and you end up saying something like: “well, when I said I had everything covered, I clearly didn’t mean E-V-E-R-Y-T-H-I-N-G!” Because testing everything is impossible. Everyone knows that, including your clients/manager/PM/developer... right?

Similarly to automation, thinking about coverage can give a false sense of security. There are so many ways software could have test coverage. Requirements coverage for example, do your tests provide 100% coverage of the requirements? What about the requirements that aren’t written down in a document? What about requirements that are documented but are ambiguous?

But I’m no expert, while Cem Kaner is, he wrote a great article on this topic, worth a look if you’ve not read it before (if you care about testing you should definitely read it). I came up with one type of coverage “requirements coverage”. Cem Kaner comes up with 101 types in the article's appendix. The next time you or your manager thinks you need 100%  test coverage, think again!