Arthur Goldberg <arthur.goldb...@mssm.edu> added the comment:

I'm another user of Ned's coverage tool. Our team at the Mount Sinai School of 
Medicine is building tools to model the dynamics of biochemistry inside 
individual cells. Our short term aims are to better understanding microbiology 
and model microorganisms so they can be engineered to more effectively produce 
drugs and do other industrial tasks. Long term, we seek to build genetically 
personalized models of human cells which can be used to improve the medical 
care of cancer and other illnesses. We're funded by several agencies of the 
federal government. Our field is called whole-cell modeling.

We use Python because it provides a wide array of powerful tools we can reuse 
to reduce our development time, enables us to rapidly prototype software to 
test and advance our modeling ideas, and is fun to program. Using git, pip, 
coverage, GitHub, CircleCI, Docker and other tools we've built a robust 
development environment that enables multiple people to contribute to advancing 
our tools for whole-cell modeling. We strongly emphasize software engineering 
because the data we use is large, incomplete and inconsistent, and our models 
are complex and difficult to train, verify and validate. We want to have a high 
level of confidence in our tested code so that if we have trouble with a model 
we can focus on checking the data and understanding the model design. Coverage 
testing is an important part of our software engineering. We test both line and 
branch coverage.

While working today on our simulator I found code that should have been fully 
covered except for a # pragma no cover, but was not fully covered. I reported 
it to Ned (https://github.com/nedbat/coveragepy/issues/697) who reproduced it 
in a simpler example and pointed out that this "Add mechanism to disable 
optimizations" issue contributed to the problem.

I realize that approximately 0.0% of Python users work on whole-cell modeling, 
which diminishes the importance of this use case. But Python is widely used in 
computational biomedicine, which represents many more users. Case in point -- 
I've created and teach a course in Biomedical Software Engineering which uses 
Python and teaches coverage testing to masters, PhD, and MD/PhD students.

We'd appreciate your help improving Ned's coverage tool. You can learn more 
about us at http://www.karrlab.org/ and https://github.com/KarrLab.

Regards
Arthur

----------
nosy: +ArthurGoldberg

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