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Derick Rethans has continued his series looking at the code coverage handling that XDebug and PHPUnit make available, allowing you to find the spots in your code not tested much easier. In this new post he talks about a new feature coming to the XDebug tool - branch and path coverage.
Picking up from where we left last time, in this second article we will look at some upcoming functionality in Xdebug. Sebastian has been pressuring me for years to add branch and path coverage to Xdebug, with issue #1034. In the post I will show you what "branch and path coverage" is, and how it helps.
How does this new type of coverage differ from the current functionality? Derick goes on to explain the difference via a simple example (and its resulting coverage). In the first example, using the XDebug available today, shows a fully tested function despite not all paths being testing correctly (a false coverage report). He gets into the "under the covers" changes he's made including how the opcodes are reported and changes he's made to the VLD to make it handle the branching smarter and make coverage more than just a "lines covered" metric. He shows an updated graph of the new coverage/branch flow and what a resulting coverage report might look like with the new "Paths" reporting.