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When 100% Code Coverage Backfiresby Ovid (Cardinal) |
on Mar 26, 2007 at 12:06 UTC ( [id://606564]=perlmeditation: print w/replies, xml ) | Need Help?? |
I was going over our code coverage reports at work and noticed that if the following snippet of code was fully covered, we'd have 100% coverage for one of our modules (with the awkward name of SQL::Stripper):
In this case, I noticed the following for the SQL::Stripper code coverage: line !l l&&!r l&&r condition 94 51 0 2 @chunks > 1 and $chunks-2 =~ s/$comment$// The number indicates how many times each condition is exercised. The exact code is this: @chunks > 1 && $chunks[-2] =~ s/$comment$//(Note that code as Devel::Cover reports it is often subtly different, but semantically equivalent, because Devel::Cover runs off of the opcodes). That code is more or less equivalent to: $left && $rightThere are only three possibly paths through that (note the headings in the Devel::Cover output I listed above):
Because of the way the SQL::Stripper code is structured, if $left is true, $right must be true because $right will always have a $comment to remove from the @chunks element. Thus, we have a code coverage condition that cannot be exercised (l&&!r), so the actual full snippet:
Might be better written as this:
That will make the code coverage tests report 100% for SQL::Stripper so I made the change. Then I realized the problem. Prior to that snippet is the following code:
That says "for this individual line of SQL, split it on comments and store the sections in @chunks. Then, if we have more than one chunk (assuming only one comment per line), the last chunk is a comment we can discard and the previous chunk just needs the comment marker removed. However, by changing my code to get 100% code coverage, I've made the code more fragile. Previously, the we effectively had an assertion that there was a comment marker in our line of SQL:
But the new code merely assumes we have that comment marker:
As a result, if someone alters the code prior to this, the more rigorous code -- which could not achieve 100% code coverage -- would have been safer to use. Using something like Carp::Assert or something similar might help here. It would make the code more robust and allow the 100% code coverage. That's part of what I like about code coverage. Now that I'm making the above change, the code is a more accurate reflection of what's really happening, though sometimes you really have to sit down and think it through. Cheers, New address of my CGI Course.
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