The Zend Developer Zone has posted the fifth and final installment of the series Stefan Priebsch has written up about debugging your application via the XDebug software.

Today, we will have a look at another great feature of xdebug - creating code coverage statistics. Code coverage statistics show how many times each line of the code has been executed. Conversely, they also show which lines of code have not been executed, which is in fact much more interesting.

He talks a bit about what code coverage is and how it can help you fine tune your application. He walks you through the installation of the two packages that will help out with running the reports - phing and PHPUnit. Using these, he shows how to create a simple unit test and a build file for phing that combine and, via the XDebug calls to xdebug_start_code_coverage, xdebug_stop_code_coverage and xdebug_get_code_coverage, are used to generate the output graphs and stats in a nice, easy to read interface.