Get ready! There are some revolutionary changes just around the corner from your NCover software team. NCover customers, early adopters, and long-time champions will attest that the imminent release of NCover 4 has been long awaited — it was worth the wait. The groundbreaking release of NCover 4 is born of the industry’s longest running relationships with code coverage champions throughout the .Net community. NCover 4 is a direct response to the needs of vibrant and growing software development teams who are continually striving for quality, accountability, transparency, and collaboration. NCover 4 is a release for the effective coverage collection teams around the globe who value data-validated decisions and the removal of roadblocks to team collaboration.
The NCover team is excited about the new paradigm for this coverage platform. We’ve taken a hard look at the obstacles to effective code coverage integration in the software life-cycle. We’ve listened to managers’ desires for flexible and more automated solutions with a wider reach to the entire software production team. Some customers want the knobs and dials to tweak every setting, but others tell us that they want NCover to “just work. I don’t want to be an NCover expert.”
Coverage is not just for developers anymore. Enter NCover 4 (fig. 1), a suite of products designed to specifically meet the variety of needs in development, quality assurance (QA), and even bridge the gap to outsourced development and testing. NCover Desktop provides the local coverage collection and analysis that developers have demanded starting with NCover’s humble beginnings. Since then, build servers have become the norm and the need to centralize coverage collection and reporting has been filled with a brand new product we call NCover Code Central.
(fig.1)
The concept of code coverage has grown beyond the developer’s desktop, and today’s integrated teams want actionable coverage data not only from automated unit and functional tests, but also from their established QA partners who have been the long-trusted gatekeepers of software release. For these teams, we’re providing a remote agent we call NCover Collector. This trio of products provides a wider scope of deployment options and team coverage collaboration tools than ever before in the code coverage arena.
NCover Desktop – Keeps up the long-standing tradition of local coverage collection and analysis. The Desktop product provides developers with local configuration of coverage collection. NCover 4 is the first NCover product with an optional, but fully integrated Visual Studio extension for both VS2008 and VS2010 (fig. 2). See your coverage result highlights inside your code documents, or just host the coverage metrics.
NCover Code Central – Introduces a new way to integrate coverage from multiple sources for a complete picture of the entire product testing cycle, in the sandbox and in the real world. NCover Code Central (fig. 3) provides a central coverage management solution where teams can pre-define coverage parameters and collect statistics from build servers, developer desktops, QA teams, and even beta testing platforms. NCover Collector is the remote agent which follows the coverage plans provided by NCover Code Central administrator, collecting and centralizing the coverage data from across the enterprise.
NCover 4 pushes the boundaries of accepted technical limitations. NCover collects coverage without the old limitation of bitness conflicts, covering all levels of the .Net framework from 1.1 through 4.5 and even Silverlight. NCover even covers partial trust applications. All this coverage is possible without the intrusion and delays of pre-instrumentation for which NCover has become so popular. We’ve even expanded the code metrics in NCover 4 to include more real-world feedback on the size of the codebase, and a popular metric known as CRAP score which calculates a score for each method based on its overall complexity and coverage completeness.
Plugins, bitness, and metrics, oh my! Yet there’s more. NCover has been completely rewritten into an attractive and simplified user interface which makes the power of the NCover suite come alive for the manager as well as the technician. You’ll love the way this UI looks and you’ll love the flexibility of accessing your coverage through the power of the browser. No more passing coverage and trend files around — upgrade to NCover Code Central and collaborate in web-enabled ease.
Put simply, NCover 4 is the most technically capable coverage tool you can put in your developers’ arsenals, on your managers’ dashboards, and on your enterprise portals. Your chance to get NCover 4 is coming. The wait is almost over.
Click here to be notified when NCover 4 ships or to join the NCover 4 beta program!