Using filters

Filters enable users to get data that meets specific reporting criteria. They can be used to report coverage results on specific sections of the source code—such as date or currency fields—to help ensure that code changed has been tested. Filters can help determine whether certain code—such as recently modified code—was executed during code coverage testing. Users can filter lines or blocks of code, indicate start and end columns to be filtered, filter whole words, and exclude code from filtering.

Critical vs. Exclude filters

Two types of filters can be created: critical filters and exclude filters.

Critical filters allows users to focus on a particular area of critical code to determine whether certain lines or blocks of code were executed. The filter results from a critical mask are included in the "Critical" columns on the Code Coverage report. If the critical branches and critical verbs are less than 100%, some critical code was not tested. Critical filters also yield a relative risk metric to help users determine the programs with the highest risk of failure is not thoroughly tested.

Exclude filters allows users to skip certain code when determining how thoroughly the program was executed. This can be particularly helpful for skipping error-handling routines that are not part of the program’s main logic; if they were included in the Code Coverage statistics, the program’s main logic would appear less thoroughly executed. By using an exclude filter, the filter results for this code are not included in the net code coverage statistics.

Line vs. Block masks

Masks are strings the user wants to look for in the program. Line masks and block masks define the scope of the filter.

Line masks identify the number of times a user-specified text string occurs between user-specified starting and ending positions in the code. The lines of code that contain the text string in the specified column range are the filtered results. A line mask could be used, for example, to display coverage information for every line of code that has the verb, MOVE, between column 1 and 80.

Block masks identify a block of code using user-specified starting and ending text strings. Lines of code between these text strings are the filtered results. For example, the mask might have P99100-GENERAL-ERROR as the starting mask and P99100-GENERAL-ERROR-EXIT as the ending mask. This filter would find code that started with P99100-GENERAL-ERROR and ended with P99100-GENERAL-ERROR-EXIT.

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