Getting branch support to work with Nose/Coverage

While Ned Batchelder's coverage utility has supported branch measurements for sometime, it hasn't been supported in the main line of the nose unit discovery util. We can see in the upcoming v1.1.3 release that the --cover-branches option will be supported:

http://readthedocs.org/docs/nose/en/latest/news.html

Currently nose v1.1.3 is still labeled as a development version, so you'd have to get pip install nose==dev in order to install this copy.

pip install --upgrade coverage
pip install --upgrade nosexcover
pip install --upgrade nose==dev (1.1.3)

An alternative, which has long been suggested in discussion groups, is to create a .coveragerc file to enable branch coverage by default. This file must be placed in the location where coverage.py is run, not necessarily in your home directory:

[run] 
     branch=True 

If you've enabled things correctly, you should see the header (instead of the default) as follows:

Name                                              Stmts   Miss Branch BrPart  Cover   Missing
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

If you're also using --with-xunit to generate Cobertura-style XML reports, hopefully you should also see the branch conditionals also being tallied correctly too!