Coverage criteria provide a useful and widely used means to guide software testing; however, indiscriminately pursuing full coverage may not always be convenient or meaningful, as not all entities are of interest in any usage context. We aim at introducing a more meaningful notion of coverage that takes into account how the software is going to be used. Entities that are not going to be exercised by the user should not contribute to the coverage ratio. We revisit the definition of coverage measures, introducing a notion of relative coverage. According to this notion, we provide a definition and a theoretical framework of relative coverage, within which we discuss implications on testing theory and practice. Through the evaluation of three different instances of relative coverage, we could observe that relative coverage measures provide a more effective strategy than traditional ones: we could reach higher coverage measures, and test cases selected by relative coverage could achieve higher reliability. We hint at several other useful implications of relative coverage notion on different aspects of software testing.

中文翻译：

---

相对于使用范围的测试

覆盖标准提供了一种有用且广泛使用的方法来指导软件测试；但是，不加选择地追求全面覆盖可能并不总是方便或有意义，因为并非所有实体都对任何使用环境感兴趣。我们的目标是引入一个更有意义的覆盖概念，考虑到软件的使用方式。用户不打算行使的实体不应对覆盖率做出贡献。我们重新审视了覆盖度量的定义，引入了相对覆盖的概念。根据这个概念，我们提供了相对覆盖率的定义和理论框架，在其中我们讨论了对测试理论和实践的影响。通过评估三个不同的相对覆盖率实例，我们可以观察到相对覆盖度量提供了比传统方法更有效的策略：我们可以达到更高的覆盖度量，并且通过相对覆盖选择的测试用例可以实现更高的可靠性。我们暗示了相对覆盖概念对软件测试不同方面的其他几个有用的含义。