Table of Contents

Introducing TCA
Coverage Analysis
The significance of runtime testing
If you get stuck

Introducing TCA

TCA (Total Coverage Analysis) lets you get "beneath the hood" of your program to see which parts of your program are actually tested and how often each block is executed. In conjunction with a runtime debugger like Insure++and a comprehensive test suite, this can dramatically improve the efficiency of your testing and guarantee faster delivery of more reliable programs.

Coverage Analysis

The idea behind test coverage is to analyze how many of an application's files, functions, and statements have been executed. This data can be used during development, and particularly during testing, to give some idea of the overall quality of the testing.

The hope is that having information about which parts of an application haven't been tested will enable you to modify or enhance your existing testing procedures to cover the untested portions.

Unfortunately, this is a vain hope with conventional testing methods, because even if the effort is made to achieve 100% test coverage, the tests will usually be heavily biased towards the "important" parts of the code which get executed most often.

Because of this, many organizations do not use test coverage analysis to any great extent in their development process.

The significance of runtime testing

An important difference emerges, however, when one considers the additional power of runtime debugging tools such as Insure++.

The quality of the checking performed by Insure++ is independent of the amount of effort put in by the development or quality assurance team - it performs complete and thorough checking on any piece of code that it executes (and also, of course, a significant amount of compile-time checking on code that it merely compiles). As a result, it makes a lot of sense to aim for 100% test coverage if you are using a product such as Insure++, because the testing is much more thorough.

For this reason, Insure++ contains the Total Coverage Analysis (TCA) module, which is a component of the Total Quality Software package designed to guide you to 100% execution of your application during the testing and quality assurance processes.

If you get stuck

If you have problems using TCA, please consult the comprehensive FAQ shipped with your distribution (FAQ.txt) first. The FAQ is also kept up-to-date on our web servers. You can also obtain a copy of the most recent FAQ by sending an empty email message to faq@parasoft.com. If your problem is not discussed in this document, please follow the procedure below in contacting our Quality Consulting department.

• Check the manual.
  
• If the problem is not urgent, report it by e-mail to quality@parasoft.com or by fax to (626) 305-9048.
  
• Before calling Quality Consulting at (626) 305-0041, know your TCA version. You can easily find it by typing tca --.
  
• Know your operating system version. You can find it by typing uname -a.
  
• If you call, please use a phone near your computer. The quality consultant may need you to try things while you are on the phone.
  
• Be prepared to recreate your problem.
  
• Please be patient.
  

Thank you for selecting TCA. Good luck on your journey towards Total Quality Software.

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Using TCA