[petsc-dev] Fwd: Nightly tests quick summary page

[Jed Brown]

On Thu, Jan 24, 2013 at 9:55 AM, Matthew Knepley <knepley at gmail.com> wrote:

> Satish had gcov working before, but it just did not prove to be very
> useful. First, we generally write tests
> to look at the workflow for something rather than as a unit test. Second,
> coverage ignores the path you
> take to get to a certain line of code. My impression is that these things
> are only useful when they tell you
> lines which are never exercised.
>

The classical objective of coverage is to find which lines are never
executed, so that you can either (a) eliminate the dead code or (b) write
better tests. A less direct objective, which would use the information in a
different way, is to detect redundant or mergeable tests. I could be wrong,
but I have a feeling that PETSc has a lot of tests that are not really
distinct. (The same applies to tutorials. They get cleaned up occasionally,
but there have been a lot of copies with only a few lines changed.)
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