Open code coverage framework: A consistent and flexible framework for measuring test coverage supporting multiple programming languages

Test coverage is an important indicator of whether software has been tested sufficiently. However, existing measurement tools for test coverage are associated with several problems such as their cost of development and maintenance, inconsistency and inflexibility in measurement. We propose a framework for consistent and flexible measurement of test coverage, called the Open Code Coverage Framework (OCCF), that supports multiple programming languages. OCCF extracts commonalities from multiple programming languages focusing on only small syntax differences in programming languages using an abstract syntax tree. OCCF provides guidelines to support several test coverage criteria. Moreover, OCCF let users expand features to add user-defined test coverage and new programming language. As a result, we reduced the lines of code required to implement measurement tools for test coverage by about 90%and the time to implement a special coverage criterion by80% or more in an experiment that compared OCCF with conventional tools developed individually without using the framework.