I discovered that within the past few days, Joseph Berkovitz and Alex Uhlmann have released Flexcover 0.50. I believe this project will be a tremendous asset for FUnit and I will be closely following it’s progress.

There is one feature in particular I’m especially impressed with. FlexCover now supports Branch Coverage. This is the first major step in not only providing test coverage, but test coverage quality. Just because a test executes your class method, doesn’t mean that all the code in that method is called. This is where Branch Coverage steps in. In a nutshell, FlexCover tracks every condition (if, else if) and whether it passes or fails. Obviously, if the condition fails, it’s code will never be executed…or tested.

One major caveat to FlexCover, however, is that it requires a “modified” Flex compiler. This is how the coverage “hooks” are injected into your application code. In addition, this step is needed emit detailed metadata of your code, files, and application structure. I anticipate that given Alex’s ties with Adobe that there will be better compiler extensibility available with the introduction of Flex 4 next year. Perhaps then this will no longer be necessary.

I have to say, the documentation for such an early project is excellent and very well outlined. I was able to get good coverage analysis for FUnit itself. I was able to create a small sub-set of FlexCover’s AIR based CoverageViewer for the web. Sadly, the source view that demonstrates the branch count won’t be available online (for now). The sample coverage data is viewable here.