Announcing the NCover 3 Beta

Over the past several months we've been working hard to build the next generation of NCover. We're finally ready to show it off, and we feel confident that you'll love it as much as we do.

So, What's New?

We've reworked how we manage coverage data in NCover, and it has led to performance improvements in many operations, including loading coverage files. It has also finally united the way that NCover and NCoverExplorer work, giving a more fluid experience between the applications. With that unification process finally completed, we were able to drive forward with some new features that we're excited to tell you about.

New Metrics

NCover 3 Beta includes Symbol and Branch Point Coverage, but it also has two new metrics - Cyclomatic Complexity and Method Visit Coverage.

Cyclomatic Complexity describes the number of independent paths through your methods. It's a great indicator of when you should refactor, and code with a low cyclomatic complexity will help you guarantee that new developers on your teams can get up to speed fairly quickly. You can learn more about Cyclomatic Complexity at Wikipedia.

While method visit coverage previously existed in NCoverExplorer, it only worked when you had symbol points for a method. With our new implementation you can guarantee that methods with no symbol points, including C# 3 automatic properties, have been tested.

Trends

Our team has been dreaming of letting developers see how their coverage has progressed for quite some time, and in NCover 3 our dream comes true. Recording trends is as easy as using the append to trends (//at) flag in NCover. Once you've recorded trends you'll be able to generate html reports with graphs of how your coverage has changed over time and you'll also be able to see those trends in NCoverExplorer.

Improved NCoverExplorer

We hated the way that NCoverExplorer in NCover 2 would close its tree view every time you reload coverage, so we fixed that. Now the tree view dynamically updates itself with your new coverage data and stays open just as it was before the reload. Also, the new NCoverExplorer tree view is able to display branch coverage and cyclomatic complexity in addition to symbol and method visit coverage that it supported in version 2.

The statistics panel has been improved to show you more statistics. We now include various statistics on whatever item you have selected in the tree view, and if you have trend data loaded we show you a trends graph.

Improved HTML Report

Trends are available in the html report, too. We've got a great graph that works across all major browsers and lets you see just how well your coverage is improving.

We felt like it was important to help you more strategically attack uncovered code, so we have replaced the old html report index with a new summary report that tells you the top 5 worst coverage offenders in several different categories.

Since coverage is ultimately about digging in and writing tests for uncovered code blocks, we wanted to give you a way to find the blocks to attack at a glance. That's why we created the Uncovered Code Report. The Uncovered Code Report shows you your top 25 blocks of uncovered code so that you'll always have a good place to start improving your coverage.