I am having a hard time running a code coverage since most of the tools (including visual studio one) requires unit tests.
I dont understand why do I need to create unit tests, why cant I basically run a code coverage with my own console exe application?
just click F5 and get the report. without putting an effort into creating unit tests or whatever.
thanks
In general, with good test coverage tool, coverage data is collected for whatever causes execution of the code. You should be able to exercise the code by hand, and get coverage data, and/or execute the code via a test case, and get coverage data.
There's a question of how you track the coverage information back to a test. Most coverage tools just collect coverage data; some other mechanism is needed to associate that coverage data with a set-of or specific test. [Note that none of this discussion cares if your tests pass. its up to you whether you want track coverage data for failed tests or not; this information is often useful when trying to find out why the test failed].
You can associate coverage data with tests by convention; Semantic Designs test coverage tools (from my company) do this. After setting up the coverage collection, you run any set of tests, by any means you desire. Each program execution produces a test coverage vector with date stamp. You can combine the coverage vectors for such a set into a single set (the UI helps you do this, or you can do it in batch script by invoking the UI as a command line tool), and then you associate the set of tests you ran with the combined coverage data. Some people associate individual tests with the coverage data collected by the individual test execution. (Doing this allows you later discover if one tests covers everything another test covers, implying you don't need the second one).
You can be more organized; you can configure your automated tests to each exercise the code, and automatically store the generated vector away in place unique to the test. This is just adding a bit of scripting to each automated test. Some specific test coverage tools come with unit test mechanisms that have a way to do it. (Our tools don't insist on a specific test framework, so they work with any framework).
