What is Statement coverage?

Understanding Statement coverage

This criterion requires sufficient test cases for each program statement to be executed at least once however its achievement is insufficient to provide confidence in a software products behavior. Statement coverage is a basic code testing metric that measures the percentage of executable statements in a program that have been exercised by test cases. While valuable as a minimum standard it fails to adequately test decision logic or detect many types of bugs and vulnerabilities. More thorough coverage metrics are typically needed. Statement coverage is referenced in testing standards like ISO/IEC/IEEE 29119 and secure development frameworks. Organizations use statement coverage as a baseline metric often combined with more rigorous coverage criteria for security-critical code. For example a development team might require 100 percent statement coverage as a minimum standard for all code but also implement decision coverage condition coverage and path coverage for security-critical components like authentication modules ensuring all possible execution paths are thoroughly tested. Related terms Code coverage Test adequacy White-box testing Decision coverage Path coverage Coverage analysis Static analysis Testing metrics.