Code coverage measures the number and kind of source code lines examined by automated tests
In software engineering, code coverage, also called test coverage, is a percentage measure of the degree to which the source code of a program is executed when a particular test suite is run. A program with high code coverage has more of its source code executed during testing, which suggests it has a lower chance of containing undetected software bugs compared to a program with low code coverage. Many different metrics can be used to calculate test coverage. Some of the most basic are the percentage of program subroutines and the percentage of program statements called during execution of the test suite.
Code coverage was among the first methods invented for systematic software testing. The first published reference was by Miller and Maloney in Communications of the ACM, in 1963.