Functional testing of systems and web products, whose number increases every day, is not an easy task and constantly requires a high level of control.

Sometimes it’s quite hard to find a good balance between all bugs found, a price, and coverage of the virtual environment for testing.

As we know, test coverage done while testing various types of software means the total basis of software code covered with a test suite.

This article will tell about several methods of test coverage that help to improve general product regression.

Test coverage: why is its scalability so important?

During manual testing, sometimes it’s quite hard to understand the quality of tests or a test suite.

Test coverage is a very important metric that shows important aspects of testing and also allows us to show weak spots that need improvement.

In other words, [highlight dark=”no”]test coverage is the same as software code quality.[/highlight] The better the coverage is, the better a product will work.

Bug-free software will result in a better user experience and will definitely engage new users.

Why do we need to perform regression testing?

As we know, regression in testing is a special type of software testing used after a product has been updated to ensure made updates have not affected software functionality.

Taking into account the fact that regression is done either after huge or small updates of software, such tests become complex and large. Manual testing is not really helpful here!

Automated regression testing is the only method to compile a working system completely, test the work environment, and also simplify interaction with additional services (of a peripheral and additional type).

We definitely can’t do without manual tests but their number is low.

How to improve regression testing

1. A QA lab should analyze all client requirements that need to be tested;
2. A team should constantly search for new and efficient resources for regression testing;
3. Use only a reliable testing strategy;
4. Constantly document a test plan;
5. Prioritize tasks (into critical tasks and secondary tasks);
6. Implement test automation to minimize manual testing.

What should be avoided during regression:

• Completely depend on automated testing systems;
• Spend time on defects and issues that can’t be tested;
• Pay attention to the total percentage of software code coverage.

Working methods of managing software test coverage

The issue of “dead code”

“Dead code” is a special block of logic that work but a received result is never used while interacting with other calculations.

Clearing software from this code helps to significantly improve the test coverage of a product’s structure.

It happens due to the fact that test coverage is in some way the relation of executed code to total software code.

When a quality assurance team gets rid of “dead code”, this will help to increase test coverage without negative effects on general software functionality.

Collecting actual data

The process of gathering information is frequently done by many product companies.

Getting familiar with innovations in the IT sector and users’ preferences helps to ensure a project group is focused on testing the most important parts of a product.

Instead of becoming a common task, testing transforms into a set of strategic needs that should be implemented (in terms of general software development and software testing).

Using a correct metric of software code coverage

Before implementing software testing, you should get familiar with things that should be tracked and analyzed.

Therefore, you need to select the most efficient metric of code coverage from all available ones, for example:

• The line coverage metric;
• The statement coverage metric;
• The solution coverage metric.

There is an unspoken rule that solving one issue should be done only with one measurement to simplify a general analyzing process.

Conclusion

It’s hard to get valid and correct quality assurance without a thorough analysis of software code (either during software development or software testing).

The usage of automation simplifies these processes while working with web products.