October 1, 2009

.NET Code Coverage

I've been looking for a good, free code coverage tool for .NET for quite a while. I know that years ago NCover used to be pretty good, but the open source version appears to be dead, replaced by a commercial version. The old version still exists and works, but it's pretty outdated. Recently I've found PartCover but haven't had a chance to thoroughly try it out. Beyond that, I haven't been able able to find anything else that is open source or even free. But neither of these two solutions appear to have lots of active development going on, which I consider a pretty important metric when looking at adopting an open source tool or framework.

It seems surprising that their isn't more activity in the open source world in this area. There seems to be many other active communities in the open source world about C# and .NET. There are many projects like NUnit and NHibernate that are actively developed and extremely helpful. But there doesn't seem to be much open source activity about code coverage. Is this because people find that the commercial options available work well at a reasonable price? Or do people just not put much importance on code coverage?

I think that code coverage receives less attention than many other software development practices like unit testing, but it still seems like it would get more focus that it currently does. I hope that there is a code coverage tool out there that I just can't find, but I'm not holding my breath.

2 comments:

Mike said...

I've tried PartCover but it has some xcopy deployment issues that I didn't really like... but that was a while ago.

Currently we're using an old (1.5ish) version of NCover from the "open" days. It works well and gives pretty good reporting and integrates nicely with CC.NET.

Channing Ray said...

NCover Seems to be very popular and looks quite good,Supports statement coverage and branch coverage.