[Bioc-devel] Announcing newtest coverage shields

[Dan Tenenbaum]

Hello Bioconductors,

We're pleased to announce a new shield to join the ones we rolled out in May.

The new shield measures test coverage of a package, as determined by Jim Hester's covr package.

Coverage is a measure of the degree to which package code is tested by your unit tests (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_coverage). If you don't know what unit tests are, read our guidelines at http://bioconductor.org/developers/how-to/unitTesting-guidelines/ .

These shields are on all package landing pages for software packages in release and devel. An example shield can be seen at 

http://bioconductor.org/packages//Biobase/

It links to a detailed coverage report at https://codecov.io/ .

If package coverage cannot be determined (shield value is 'unknown'), the shield links to a section of 
http://bioconductor.org/developers/how-to/unitTesting-guidelines/#coverage explaining why
this might be. 

Note that the coverage calculation happens on our linux build machines only and is not run as part of the nightly builds, but it is run several times a week. Only packages whose code has changed since the last calculation are run through covr.

We hope this shield motivates package developers to add unit tests (if they don't have them already) and improve their package's unit test coverage. Refer to the covr
documentation (http://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/covr/README.html) for more
information on how to do this.

Questions and comments are welcome as always on the bioc-devel list.

Thanks,
Dan