Internal Testing

Code coverage is not the only way to judge the quality of a test suite, but it is a leading indicator. Low code coverage likely means the test suite is inadequate, but high coverage does not mean the test suite is bullet-proof.

CoverMe

Ruby 1.9 changed enough of the implementation’s internals that the old coverage library, rcov, no longer works. Thankfully, the Ruby development team added hooks to make coverage measurement even easier than it was in 1.8.

The best coverage library for 1.9 is CoverMe: https://github.com/markbates/cover_me/

Setup

Add gem "cover_me" to your Gemfile in the development/test section and run bundle.

Once the gem is installed there are two additional steps:

1. Open spec/spec_helper.rb and add require 'cover_me' as the first line
2. Run rails generate cover_me:install from the terminal to add it to the default RSpec testing tasks

Usage

Run your tests normally with bundle exec rake. After each run there will be a coverage data file output in your project directory. To generate and open a report using the data, execute the provided Rake task:

$

rake cover_me:report

That’s about all there is to it!

Want More Metrics?

If you want to go totally bananas with metrics, try the metric_fu gem: https://github.com/jscruggs/metric_fu

It includes tools to estimate code complexity, find repetitive code snippets, and more.