Coverage is not strongly correlated with test suite effectiveness
You don’t even need to do a study to arrive at this conclusion. Has no one read Djikstra’s writings? <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cs.utexas.edu&#x2F;users&#x2F;EWD&#x2F;ewd02xx&#x2F;EWD249.PDF" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cs.utexas.edu&#x2F;users&#x2F;EWD&#x2F;ewd02xx&#x2F;EWD249.PDF</a><p>“Program testing can be used to show the presence of bugs, but never to show their absence!”<p>Everybody in our industry wants to bash math and say that anyone can write programs, but programs are logical systems and can only be fully understood with math and logic.<p>We have the tools for understanding and reasoning about infinitely large structures, programmers just refuse to use them, and even deride them.<p>Well, I am not in that camp, and I work on math and logic skills to help me develop working software. It isn’t perfect, but it’s the only path that makes sense to me.<p>&gt; But complexity sells better and the market pulls in the opposite direction. I still remember finding a book on how to use &quot;Wordperfect 5.0&quot; of more than 850 pages, in fact a dozen pages more than my 1951 edition of Georg Joos, &quot;Theoretical Physics&quot;! It is time to unmask the computing community as a Secret Society for the Creation and Preservation of Artificial Complexity. And then we have the software engineers, who only mention formal methods in order to throw suspicion on them. In short, we should not expect too much support from the computing community at large. And from the mathematical community I have learned not to expect too much support either, as informality is the hallmark of the Mathematical Guild, whose members —like poor programmers— derive their intellectual excitement from not quite knowing what they are doing and prefer to be thrilled by the marvel of the human mind (in particular their own ones). For them, the Dream of Leibniz is a Nightmare. In summary, we are on our own.
But that does not matter. In the next fifty years, Mathematics will emerge as The Art and Science of Effective Formal Reasoning, and we shall derive our intellectual excitement from learning How to Let the Symbols Do the Work.<p>Calculemus!<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cs.utexas.edu&#x2F;users&#x2F;EWD&#x2F;transcriptions&#x2F;EWD12xx&#x2F;EWD1243a.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cs.utexas.edu&#x2F;users&#x2F;EWD&#x2F;transcriptions&#x2F;EWD12xx&#x2F;E...</a>