Thoughts on the effectiveness of code coverae

[gbrail]

I was in a discussion that questioned the value of code coverage metrics at work, and I was curious to see if there was academic research on it.

It turns out that there is -- and it suggests that yes, improving code coverage improves quality. In particular, I was interested in this part of the abstract:

In this preliminary study, we have performed an experiment on 67 and 92 real bugs from Apache HTTPClient and Mozilla Rhino, respectively. Our experiment finds that there is indeed statistically significant correlation between code coverage and bug kill effectiveness. The strengths of the correlation, however, differ for the two software systems. For HTTPClient, the correlation is moderate for both statement and branch coverage. For Rhino, the correlation is strong for both statement and branch coverage.

Unfortunately I am not an IEEE member so I can't request access but maybe someone will be kind to us.

https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/7081877