Differences between Line and Branch coverage

Question

I use the Cobertura Maven plugin for one of my project. But I have a question about the generated report:

What is the difference between line and branch coverage?

Answer 1

Take this code as a simplified example:

if(cond) {
    line1();
    line2();
    line3();
    line4();
} else {
    line5();
}

If your test only exercises the cond being true and never runs the else branch you have:

• 4 out of 5 lines covered
• 1 out of 2 branches covered

Also Cobertura report itself introduces some nice pop-up help tooltips when column header is clicked:

Line Coverage - The percent of lines executed by this test run.

Branch Coverage - The percent of branches executed by this test run.