On Sun, 18 Feb 2007, Baird, David wrote:

Hi David,

Thank you for providing more detailed feedback!

>  Just to be certain, I hope we are both talking about Devel-Cover-0.61 
>  by Paul Johnson.

Almost. PerlCov uses version 0.59, but will probably be upgraded to 0.61
for the release.

>  Overall, the GUI for Coverage Analyzer is compelling, but it is very 
>  lacking in the coverage tools it provides:
> 
>  * perlcov-perl doesn't support Perl 5.6.1, whereas Devel-Cover does

Devel::Cover does have various problems on Perl 5.6.1, which is the
reason we didn't want to support 5.6.1 with our tool, at least
initially. We can add support for 5.6.1 if there is sufficient interest
in it, but it would of course inherit the same problems that
Devel::Cover itself has.

>  * Devel::Cover creates a web based report, which is accessible to a
>    large development group

That is true.  When we planning this feature, we grouped use cases in
3 areas:

* Single users working on their applications or modules on a single machine
* Teams of developers working on the same codebase
* Autobuild systems generating data on multiple machines & platforms

While we do want to eventually provide functionality for all 3 groups,
we decided that we need to implement sufficient useful functionality for
a single user before we would attempt to appeal to the other 2
scenarios.

The application is structured into a backend storage engine and the
frontend GUI to eventually allow multi-user access to the data (and
updating of the database from multiple simultaneous sources).

Right now you can put the PerlCov database into a network location and
access it with multiple clients (use the "File|Change Database..." menu
item for the GUI or PERLCOV_DB for the commandline tools). Only a single
user should write to the location though, with the current
implementation.

>  * The code displayed in Devel::Cover is colored, for easier reading

I don't understand this one. We do full syntax highlighting of the code,
whereas Devel::Cover doesn't. Could you elaborate on what you mean here?

>  * There are several coverage tools in Devel::Cover not apparent in
>    Coverage Analyzer: conditionals, subroutine, pod

We intentionally left out conditionals as we could not find a useful
graphical representation for that information. Do you find that
information as presented by Devel::Cover useful (as opposed to merely
"interesting")?

Subroutine coverage is included in the report area in the top pane.
Could you please elaborate on what exactly you are looking for?

Pod coverage is indeed missing too, as it seems to be new functionality
in Devel::Cover 0.61. Before it required a separate module that at least
in our tests frequently crashed, so we decided that it wasn't stable
enough for a "canned" tool. We'll look into supporting the new pod
functionality in 0.61.

>  * The branch coverage tool in Coverage Analyzer is not obvious, it
>    should be part of the overall report

It is quite a challenge to display the branch coverage in a useful manner.

Everyone we talked to found the separate list of branch coverage that
the Devel::Cover HTML pages provide to be lacking in context, therefore
we tried to integrate the information in the main display.

We would love to hear suggestions how to provide the information in better way.

>  * I'd like to see a list of subroutines for each file and how much
>    they are covered

Again, this list should be in the upper pane on top of the source
listing. Did you try out the different display modes (tree vs. flat) and
sorting options?

>  * I should like to export a report comparing results of different runs

We were planning to provide a reporting feature, but decided to postpone
this until we get some feedback on the tool itself, and what kind of
reports users actually want.

We thought reports are again more useful in a team environment, and
reports would probably be more of the "management" variety that show
how much code coverage has been improved, or dead code has been
eliminated, etc.

Is that the kind of report you were looking for? What format would you
prefer for reports? HTML? PDF?

Since we obviously couldn't implement a comprehensive special case
report writer and graphing tool that would generate arbitrary types of
report, we were also discussing the possibility of exporting report data
in e.g. CSV format, where it could be manipulated by other specialized
tools, scripts or spreadsheets.

>  * I'd like to specify which files to include in the coverage report,
>    especially if I am testing my project's modules

Yes, this is already an open enhancement request. We intentionally
collect *all* data at runtime and want to use the GUI to narrow down the
view to just the files you want, but we don't have implemented the UI
for that yet.

Cheers,
-Jan

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