Decision Coverage Definition

Decision Coverage is one of the structural or design-based testing techniques in the domain of software engineering. In this technique, the designing of code is made under such guidelines that every possible branch/decision point of source code shall be reached and exercised in at least one flow of execution.

The coverage metric is pretty important in verifying the effectiveness and extent of test cases prepared by a tester to identify and correct potential errors found in each conditional statement of the application. To ensure that this criterion is satisfied, tests made up ensure the coverage of all possible decisions’ outcomes of the decision points. It just finds the bugs running loose from most other methods of testing, like the statement coverage test that ensures that all lines of code have been used but it does not necessarily mean that all paths have been examined.

For this reason, such an approach to testing would be very useful in critical systems, where software has to work as intended under all conditions and inputs; otherwise, the failure could easily prove disastrous.