Hi Branden, i think you are getting carried away quite a bit.
FWIW, i don't think the concept of "code coverage" has much value in the first place. Yes, i have been forced by management to consider "code coverage reports" in previous jobs in the industry. Yes, it is true that, if not a single test in a suite exercises a certain line in the code, that test suite tells you nothing about the presence (or later introduction) of bugs involving that particular line. But even if a test suite exercises a particular line multiple times, that line may still contain bugs, and future changes may introduce bugs into that line without the test suite noticing. So coverage says pretty little about the quality of a test suite. There are criteria that are way more important for the quality of automatic testing than coverage - for example, simplicity and clarity of the design of the test cases, readability of the test code, logical organization (such that the test suite can be maintained, reviewed, and extended by humans). It is also way more important to test complex situations that matter in practice, and to logically structure the suite by features (as opposed to by code lines) than hitting any particular line in the code. All that said - not much harm done by wasting a bit of time on colourful HTML generation if you want to please your inner child by playing around a bit, or if management wants to produce some numbers that can be put into reports that will impress even higher management (as opposed to fostering actual improvement). But don't deceive yourself, as if such traffic light coloration would bring about enlightenment... Yours, Ingo
