I like building tests for my code. That is not an old habit, it’s just something I’ve been developing in the recent months or some few years. No, I am not doing TDD (although that doesn’t sound like a bad idea): I just build tests after I code as a safeguard – to be sure I haven’t broken anything. I suspect there are more programmers like myself than those using tests as part of a TDD (BDD, SDD, etc) approach, but that is just an opinion.

Well I just recently became found of code coverage estimates and tools, and rcov is such a nice tool that sometimes I just find myself building tests just to “please” it. I also suspect there are at least a bunch of people that do the same. Here are the results of the test coverage of one of my projects:

spectra@rohan:~/work/xmpp4r-observable$ rake rcov
(in /home/spectra/work/xmpp4r-observable)
rm -r coverage
Loaded suite /usr/bin/rcov
Started
........................
Finished in 70.995814 seconds.

24 tests, 97 assertions, 0 failures, 0 errors
+----------------------------------------------------+-------+-------+--------+
|                  File                              | Lines |  LOC  |  COV   |
+----------------------------------------------------+-------+-------+--------+
|lib/xmpp4r-observable.rb                            |   648 |   414 |  61.4% |
|lib/thread_store.rb                                 |    58 |    39 |  87.2% |
|lib/observable_thing.rb                             |   187 |   118 |  91.5% |
+----------------------------------------------------+-------+-------+--------+
|Total                                               |   893 |   571 |  69.4% |
+----------------------------------------------------+-------+-------+--------+
69.4%   3 file(s)   893 Lines   571 LOC
spectra@rohan:~/work/xmpp4r-observable$

Sure it’s tempting to get more of lib/xmpp4r-observable.rb covered, isn’t it?