Reducing coverage collection overhead with disposable instrumentation

Testers use coverage data for test suite quality assessment, stopping criteria definition, and effort allocation. However, as the complexity of products and testing processes increases, the cost of coverage data collection may grow significantly, jeopardizing its potential application. We present two techniques to mitigate this problem based on the concept of "disposable coverage instrumentation": coverage instrumentation that is removed after its usage. The idea is to reduce coverage collection overhead by removing instrumentation probes after they have been executed. We have extended a Java virtual machine to support these techniques, and show their potential through empirical studies with the Specjvm98 and Specjbb2000 benchmarks. The results indicate that the techniques can reduce coverage collection overhead between 18% and 97% over existing techniques.