Efficient instrumentation for code coverage testing

Abstract

Evaluation of Code Coverage is the problem of identifying the parts of a program that did not execute in one or more runs of a program. The traditional approach for code coverage tools is to use static code instrumentation. In this paper we present a new approach to dynamically insert and remove instrumentation code to reduce the runtime overhead of code coverage. We also explore the use of dominator tree information to reduce the number of instrumentation points needed. Our experiments show that our approach reduces runtime overhead by 38-90% compared with purecov, a commercial code coverage tool. Our tool is fully automated and available for download from the Internet.