Code Coverage – The Peace Maker?

In business we find ourselves interacting with people from different departments and with varying goals and input on a particular project. Sometimes all of these people and objectives align perfectly and everything works smoothly with your project on time and under budget. However, other times, we find ourselves looking at items with different concerns and development can get off track – from bugs or timelines.

Yes – alignment issues are an issue no matter the organization. What does this have to do with code coverage?

Here at NCover, we see this misalignment most often with Quality Assurance and Development teams. The Quality Assurance division of any software development company is often structured around the tools used to analyze software rather than the process maintained to deploy healthy solutions. Development is structured around being able to build and write code.  These differences can lead to rifts between the coders building a structure of a project and the coders looking at the finished project for potentially buggy code.  Code coverage can bridge this gap and consistently produce high-quality deployed solutions.

How you ask? When did code coverage become the Geneva of quality code development?

Code coverage can help align and set expectations across both teams. For example, maintaining a coverage threshold for all builds helps keep Development and Quality Assurance aligned. This practice sets a standard that all builds sent to Quality Assurance must satisfy. This can stop careless development efforts and redirect responsibility from the individual reviewing the project to the individual coding the project. Time spent finger pointing or assigning blame can now be redirected towards building quality .NET applications.

Looking for a way to align your development and quality assurance teams? Code coverage may be the place to start.