Thursday, March 16, 2006

HTML Coverage Reporting

I've had a couple of users ask whether NCoverExplorer might ever offer the ability to generate HTML reports of code coverage. An example of the potential sort of output (including the source code highlighted) is shown by Clover.

I'm interested to know just how much demand there is for this feature. It looks pretty but personally I doubt I would make use of this particular report - html pages by their nature are static and the hundreds or thousands of pages generated are virtually guaranteed to be out of date immediately as the code changes. I'm open to being educated though - what usage would you make of such a feature if NCoverExplorer offered it, or is it just a "nice to have"?

The one type of reporting I have found useful is the top summary section produced by the coverage.xsl that comes with NCover. The downside of the XSL approach is it is just way too slow on large coverage files. It could be fairly easy for NCoverExplorer instead to produce a static HTML summary page showing the graph percentages. This report could then be included as a CruiseControl build artifact (if I make a console driven NCoverExplorer version) or via e-mail.

Does this have any appeal? If so, what sort of reports would you like to see (e.g. assembly coverage summary only or namespace/class summary). How detailed and customisable do the report(s) need to be?

All input for and against welcomed - either in the blog comments, or post your thoughts in the TestDriven.Net users group in this thread.

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posted by kiwidude @ 12:56 pm   1 comments

1 Comments:

At March 16, 2006 8:21 pm, Anonymous Anonymous said...

We use XML output in cruise control reports, and I do have the issue that they are too large.
I don't need a log of all covered lines at every build, but I do need a log of coverage errors and % covered statistics.
Perpahs that's more to do with NCover than the explorer.
That example you show of Clover does look like something I could post in the project WIKI site.
Although it is quickly out of date, upper management don't like ploughing through cruise control build logs. They like monthly "nice looking" reports.
Still, I wonder if this would present correctly in a WIKI (we use Perspective).
Hope some of this rambling makes sense.
Trevor

 

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