Branch Coverage for Arbitrary Languages Made Easy

Branch coverage is an important measure of the thoroughness of testing. One can easily get tools that collect this information for mainstream languages (C, Ada) on mainstream platforms (Solaris, UNIX). Such tools are difficult to find for less widely used or interpretive languages (JavaScript) or languages used on nonstandard platforms (C in embedded systems). This paper shows the straightforward result that an industrial strength source-to-source transformation system can install test probes in software systems easily. What is not obvious is that such transformation systems exist. The consequential good news is that branch coverage testing tools can be easily built for all kinds of software in all kinds of execution environments