Name: inR10064 Date: 02/27/2003



For now JCov do not provide convenient mode for gathering data about invocations
of interface methods. The same seems to be correct for abstract methods of abstract
classes.

In some areas of test development significant part of tested API consists of
interfaces not pure classes. Usually some factory methods are used to get
implementation of these interfaces to operate with help of the interface methods
so that exact implementing classes remain unknown. A factory can also choose
the implementation classes dynamicly. So the tests for such API should
only use interface methods in the code. So numbers of interface method invocations
within test code will give much more precise information about coverage of API
than data about execution of RI methods implementing the API interface methods
which is provided by JCov.

The example is DOM level 2 in JAXP 1.1 and JDK 1.4 (the org.w3c.dom
package) where 17 interfaces provide methods to traverse and manipulate parsed
XML document represented in a tree of objects. Common test (application) gets
reference to root node (instance of the org.w3c.dom.Document interface) with some
method of the javax.xml.parsers.DocumentBuilder class and after that the test only
invokes methods of interfaces defined in DOM API. In DOM some interfaces extend
other interfaces in the API so given a particular execution of RI method it's
impossible to know method of which interface/superinterface is actually checked.


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