Multi-Point Stride Coverage: A New Genre Of Test Coverage Criteria

We introduce a family of coverage criteria called Multi-Point Stride Coverage (MPSC). MPSC generalizes branch coverage to coverage of tuples of branches taken from the execution sequence of a program. We investigate its potential as a replacement for dataflow coverage such as def-use coverage. We find that programs can be instrumented for MPSC easily that the instrumentation usually incurs less overhead than that for def-use coverage and that MPSC is comparable in usefulness to def-use in predicting test suite eectiveness. We also find that the space required to collect MPSC can be predicted from the number of branches in the program.