Code coverage is a measurement of how many lines/blocks/arcs of your code are executed while the automated tests are running.
Code coverage is collected by using a specialized tool to instrument the binaries to add tracing calls and run a full set of automated tests against the instrumented product. A good tool will give you not only the percentage of the code that is executed, but also will allow you to drill into the data and see exactly which lines of code were executed during a particular test.
Our team uses Magellan - an in-house set of code coverage tools. If you are a .NET shop, Visual Studio has integrated tools to collect code coverage. You can also roll some custom tools, like this article describes.
If you are a C++ shop, Intel has some tools that run for Windows and Linux, though I haven't used them. I've also heard there's the gcov tool for GCC, but I don't know anything about it and can't give you a link.
As to how we use it - code coverage is one of our exit criteria for each milestone. We have actually three code coverage metrics - coverage from unit tests (from the development team), scenario tests (from the test team) and combined coverage.
BTW, while code coverage is a good metric of how much testing you are doing, it is not necessarily a good metric of how well you are testing your product. There are other metrics you should use along with code coverage to ensure the quality.
You could use the @Rule annotation with ExpectedException, like this:
@Rule
public ExpectedException expectedEx = ExpectedException.none();
@Test
public void shouldThrowRuntimeExceptionWhenEmployeeIDisNull() throws Exception {
expectedEx.expect(RuntimeException.class);
expectedEx.expectMessage("Employee ID is null");
// do something that should throw the exception...
System.out.println("=======Starting Exception process=======");
throw new NullPointerException("Employee ID is null");
}
Note that the example in the ExpectedException docs is (currently) wrong - there's no public constructor, so you have to use ExpectedException.none().
Best Solution
I'm assuming this is a test developer position. I.e. you are developing test automation. If so, I would expect two major sorts of questions:
1) Programming questions. See lots of other questions on SO for examples. Figure out what language they use and brush up.
2) Test questions. these will be things like: How would you test a telephone, chair, rubber ball, etc.? How would you test a program (like notepad)? The key to answering the second set of questions is to break it down into categories and exhaustively test each. Test the main functionality. Test the corner cases. Test it for security, stress, etc.