Automatic calculation of coverage profiles for coverage-based testings

Abstract

Code-coverage-based testing is a widely-used testing strategy with the aim of providing a meaningful decision criterion for the adequacy of a test suite. Code-coverage-based testing is also used for the development of safety-critical applications, as the modified condition/decision coverage (MCDC) is proposed by the DO178b document. One critical issue of code-coverage testing is that they are typically applied to source code while the generated machine code may result in a different code structure due to code optimizations performed by an compiler. In this work we describe the automatic calculation of coverage profiles describing which structural code-coverage criteria are preserved by which code optimization. These coverage profiles allow to easily extend compilers with the feature of preserving any given code-coverage criteria by enabling only those code optimizations that preserve it.