The nice folk at Software Verification have done a major new release of Coverage Validator, and the new version fixes many of the issues I noted in a previous post. In particular:

• The instrumentation can use breakpoint functionality to get better line coverage on builds with debug information enabled.
• Previous sessions can be automatically merged into new sessions.
• The default colour scheme has been toned down.
• The flashing that happened when you resized the source window has gone.
• It is now possible to mark sections of code not to be instrumented. I haven’t had time to try this yet, as it was only introduced in v3.0.4. But it should be very useful as currently I have a lot of defensive code that should never be reached (see below). Instrumenting this code skews the coverage stats and makes it harder to spot lines that should have been executed, but weren’t.

There are still a few issues:

• I had problems trying to instrument release versions of my code.
• It still fails to instrument some lines (but not many).
• I had a couple of crashes during testing that don’t seem to have been caused by my software (although I can’t prove that).

But the technical support has been very responsive and new versions are released fairly frequently. Overall version 3 is a major improvement to a very useful tool. Certainly it helped me find a few bugs during the testing of version 4 of Perfect Table Plan on Windows. I just wish there was something comparable for MacOSX.