Legacy Projects: Coverage Data without Tests

From my previous post, Get Statistics from your Build Server, I spoke about getting meaningful data into your log output as soon as possible so that you can begin to generate reports about the state of your application.

I'm using NCover to provide code coverage analysis, but I can also get important metrics like Non-Comment Lines Of Code, number of classes, members, etc.  Unfortunately, I have no unit tests so my coverage report contains no data.  Since NCover will only profile assemblies that are loaded into the profiler's memory space, referencing my target assembly into my Test assembly isn't enough.  To compensate, i added this simple test to load the assembly into memory:

[Test]
public void CanLoadAssemblyToProvideCoverageData()
{
 System.Reflection.Assembly.Load("AssemblyName");
}

This is obviously a dirty hack, and I'll remove it the second I write some tests.  Although I only have 0% coverage, I now have a detailed report that shows over 40,000 lines of untested code.  The stage is now set to remove duplication and introduce code coverage.