docs/dev/coverage.pod - Make Cover Documentation.
"make cover" is a very useful tool which generates reports on how well tested parrot code is. The coverage reports are outputted in various formats in cover_db/ after make cover has run. The final result of make cover is a listing of parrot's source files and a matching percentage of how well covered that file is by the tests.
Obviously, the first step would be to get parrot and build it. See docs/intro.pod for more information. To run "make cover" you must first install some Perl tools to aid in the creation of these reports. Make Cover requires the "Devel::Cover" perl module. If you are running Debian/Ubuntu type systems you can run
sudo apt-get install libdevel-cover-perlor using CPAN:
perl -MCPAN -e 'install Devel::Cover'and that will install the required module. Other OSes may have this packaged as well, so try to find it. If you do not have a packaged version of this module, head over to http://search.cpan.org/dist/Devel-Cover/ and install it.
Next, make sure your working parrot directory is as clean as can be. Any left over files can cause problems when generating the coverage reports.
make realclean
or
git clean -dfxNext, run make test to see if there are any failing tests. Finally you can type in make cover and leave to make a sandwich and something to drink because its probably going to take a long time to run. If you run into trouble, make fulltest may be of some assistance.
If you have run make cover before, you know how long it takes to execute that command. Recently a new tool make quickcover has been added that is much faster, but does not run tests in all runcores.