GPROF Test Coverage Script

GPROF Test Coverage Script

There are many software development tools available to do testing coverage. But here's an easy way to do function-level test coverage using GCC and GPROF on Linux. GPROF is a performance profiling tool that's intended to help you identify CPU usage costs across your code, but it can also be repurposed to help with test coverage.

The method is basically:

• Re-compile your program with g++ using the “-pg” options (debug mode)
• Run your program in test mode (i.e. runs the unit test harness)
• After execution, there's a binary file “gmon.out” in the current directory.
• Run gprof to process “gmon.out” and generate a profiling report (in human-readable text format)
• Use a script to extract the “uncalled functions” section in the report (e.g. use “awk”)
• Then you have a list of functions not “covered” by unit tests.

Personally, I build all of these steps into a Makefile, so I can run my own command like “make coverage”, but you can also script it separately.