There should be a one-click action on the JUnit runner, which reruns the selected test with code coverage enabled, and then highlights precisely those lines of code executed by the failed test. Since it is known that whatever code defect cause the test to fail must occur in an executed line, this will allow the user to quickly ignore those lines which couldn't possibly be causing the failure. Additionally, users may be able to detect an anomaly in the covered lines ("Why the hell did that get executed!?!") , which leads them to the bug. While this is all currently possible with a bit of setup, most people don't think of it. Making this single-click easy would allow people to leverage code coverage to for debugging, rather than just quality assurance. Cosmetically, I would suggest that highlighting not be done via red/green gutter marks, but rather by changing the background for covered code. Unlike QA, in coverage for debugging purposes, the uncovered part is unimportant, and the covered part crucially important.