Code Coverage (PL/I)

Code coverage for PL/I in Enterprise Developer integrates the Micro Focus Test Coverage facility.

These are the steps to enable code coverage for your applications and then run them to produce code coverage reports:

  1. Enable code coverage in the properties of a project, a build configuration's or a file.
    Note: If different from the project settings, the build configuration settings take precedence over the project settings when you build your application. If you enabled code coverage at project level but do not receive any results when you run the application, it might be because the application was executed in a build configuration which does not have code coverage enabled. To work around this, always ensure code coverage is enabled for the build configuration you are running your application in.
  2. Compile your project to apply the changes.
  3. Create a launch configuration that has code coverage enabled and execute your application in it.

While an application is running with code coverage, code execution is logged for each program and sub-program that has been compiled with code coverage enabled. The results are stored in a binary results file which has the filename extension .tcz. In the IDE, you can specify your preferences for what level of details test coverage should write into the results file depends on how you configure test coverage.

For example, you can tag statements in your source code and use code coverage to report on whether these statements have been executed. This is particularly useful if you want to see the coverage of new or changed lines in your source code.

For convenience, Enterprise Developer visualizes the code coverage information from the results file by showing statistics about covered (executed) or missed (unexecuted) blocks and programs in a Code Coverage view and by highlighting the covered and missed blocks in the editor in different colors. You can produce code coverage reports in HTML format.

Micro Focus recommends that you do not use code coverage in a production system because of the increased requirements on system resources when running in code coverage mode. However, you can compile with code coverage enabled into your production system, if needed. Additionally, you should exercise caution when enabling code coverage on large remote projects, as this results in a significant amount of data transfer caused by the required project files being transferred locally for processing of the test coverage results.