Ruby Coverage Tool Making Rapid Progress

Posted by Obie Fernandez on May 25, 2006

Sections

Process & Practices,

Development,

Operations & Infrastructure

Topics

Build systems ,

Artifacts & Tools ,

Ruby

Tags

Continuous Improvement ,

Testing

Rcov is a tool for simple code coverage analysis in Ruby that is 20-300 times faster than previous tools. The latest release (0.4.0) has many notable improvements. The author, Mauricio Fernandez, attributes the improvements in large part to the use of rcov on itself to achieve better test coverage.

Parts of the code have been moved into a reusable library that allows you to
build on top of rcov's coverage analysis capabilities. This change allowed for
much better testing of rcov's internals, which helped squash many bugs and add
features while making the overall code look better thanks to some long-needed
refactoring.

The standard XHTML reports sport a better color-scheme and plain text output formats are notably improved. A sample code coverage report generated by rcov is available online. The new release also includes rake support, for easy integration into your project's automated build.

Good news for Windows-based Ruby developers: a win32 binary is available for the latest version which increases performance by more than 100 times over previous versions.

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