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Coverage Validator Help

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Why Coverage Validator?

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Adapts to everyone's workflow

 

Coverage Validator allows you to find how much of your software is being executed by a particular test, using an intuitive colour-coded user interface.

 

If you want to edit the source code for a line that is not being visited, it's simple. Just double click on the code fragment shown and the appropriate source code file will be loaded into Coverage Validator's colour-coded editor, or into Microsoft® Visual Studio®, or you can choose your preferred awesome editor.

 

You can save sessions, reload them at a later date, and interact with the collected data. You can also export to HTML or XML which can be used to create reports targeted to the appropriate audience: the management team; quality assurance team; or to create detailed coverage reports for the software engineers.

 

 

Designed with principles

 

Coverage Validator and the other products in our suite of tools have been created with the following principles in mind:

 

principles

 

must not adversely effect the program's behaviour

Any hooks placed into the target program's code must not affect the registers or the condition code flags of that program. The program must behave in the same way when being inspected by Coverage Validator as without.

 

must be reliable and avoid causing the target program to crash

Since we can't know exactly which DLLs and other components are present on every computer that Coverage Validator is installed on, every hook can be enabled or disabled, and/or installed or not installed.

 

Thus if a new DLL is released in the future that causes problems with certain functions, you can disable the hooks for those functions, and continue using Coverage Validator until a fix for the new DLL's behaviour is available.

 

must have as little impact on the target program's performance as possible

Coverage Validator has very little effect on the target applications performance, but you can also enable and disable as many or as few function hooks as you wish.

 

For example:

 

If you are only interested in coverage of a particular area of code you can pick only that directory to be hooked.
 
If you're only interested in a selection of in-house DLLs, choose only those modules to be hooked.

 

must have a user interface independent of the target program

Coverage Validator's user interface is independent of the target program.

 

This means:

 

If the target program crashes, the user interface will not crash - you will still have data to work with.

 

If the target program is stopped in the debugger, Coverage Validator's user interface will continue to work.

 

In the unlikely event that the Coverage Validator's own user interface crashes, your target program will not crash.

 

must be flexible

We know our users like choices! Where there are multiple ways of presenting the data, the user is given a choice over how that display works, so that not all users have to work with the same settings.