Coverity Test Advisor

Intelligent Code
and Test Analysis

Unit testing is valuable in concept but inefficient in practice. Code coverage is commonly used as the metric to determine ‘adequate vs. inadequate’ testing in development, but can be misleading. Without the proper insight into the code, coverage is just an arbitrary number which wastes developer time and increases risk.

With Test Advisor, you can:

• define a meaningful unit testing policy based on your high risk code criteria.
• automatically analyze your code with every change and accurately identify untested code violations as unit tests are executed.

Test Rule Configurator

Establish and enforce consistent unit testing rules across projects and teams based on your high risk criteria. This ensures high risk and changed code is tested sufficiently as part of a standardized process. For example, a sample test rule could be defined as follows:

100% coverage must be achieved for:

• all new code since the last release
• all functions that have cyclomatic complexity > 5
• critical components A, B and C
• excluding exception handling code

Test Advisor provides sample rules to help you get started and supports the creation of customized rules based on your organization and codebase. Testing rules guide developers on what tests they need—and don’t need—to write.

Coverity Static Analysis Verification Engine (Coverity SAVE^®) is the analysis foundation for the Coverity Development Testing platform. This award-winning analysis engine applies multiple patented techniques for accurate issue detection, based on a decade of research and development and analysis of over 5 billion lines of proprietary and open source code.

As a foundation for Test Advisor, Coverity SAVE intelligently tests code with a deep understanding of its behavior, criticality and change impact to focus testing on high risk areas and analyze unit test effectiveness based on your defined testing rules.

New innovations include:

Change Impact Analysis – Patent Pending

Automatically map code and function dependencies to analyze all impacted code related to a change—both code that has been directly modified and unmodified code that is impacted by the code change. Risk and code change go hand-in-hand, so the only way to ensure complete testing coverage over high risk code is to understand the full scope and impact of a change.

Test Data Correlation Analysis – Patent Pending

Automatically correlate discrete data from multiple sources, including Coverity SAVE^®, test coverage and source control management, turning data into actionable testing intelligence so you can easily identify untested code violations based on your defined rules.

For example, the only way to verify if the above testing rule has been met is to correlate multiple pieces of information.

Efficient Issue
Management

Untested code violations are surfaced by Test Advisor for quick and easy remediation.

Automated Test Violation Management

Provide information and guidance to help developers efficiently manage untested code violations to closure.

• Prioritize violations to guide developers to focus on the most critical test issues.
• Automatically assign violations to the developer responsible for the change.
• Provide specific remediation guidance including level of coverage, covering tests, code age and code not requiring coverage.

Coverity Connect is the collaborative issue management console to efficiently manage all issues surfaced by Quality Advisor, Security Advisor and Test Advisor to resolution within a unified workflow.

Coverity also provides seamless bi-directional integration with existing lifecycle tools to make development testing a natural part of the SDLC process.

Check out our complete list of SDLC integrations here.

Test Completeness

Test Advisor drives developer accountability by establishing a standard testing process within your development organization and ensures test completeness.

Verify that developers have created and executed the necessary unit tests in lock step with code development. Create a testing stage gate within Policy Manager to validate code has been completely tested before it’s promoted to QA.

Get
Started