How to add test coverage to a private constructor?

Well, there are ways you could potentially use reflection etc - but is it really worth it? This is a constructor which should never be called, right?

If there's an annotation or anything similar that you can add to the class to make Cobertura understand that it won't be called, do that: I don't think it's worth going through hoops to add coverage artificially.

EDIT: If there's no way of doing it, just live with the slightly reduced coverage. Remember that coverage is meant to be something which is useful to you - you should be in charge of the tool, not the other way round.

I don't entirely agree with Jon Skeet. I think that if you can get an easy win to give you coverage and eliminate the noise in your coverage report, then you should do it. Either tell your coverage tool to ignore the constructor, or put the idealism aside and write the following test and be done with it:

@Test
public void testConstructorIsPrivate() throws NoSuchMethodException, IllegalAccessException, InvocationTargetException, InstantiationException {
  Constructor<Foo> constructor = Foo.class.getDeclaredConstructor();
  assertTrue(Modifier.isPrivate(constructor.getModifiers()));
  constructor.setAccessible(true);
  constructor.newInstance();
}

Although it's not necessarily for coverage, I created this method to verify that the utility class is well defined and do a bit of coverage as well.

/**
 * Verifies that a utility class is well defined.
 * 
 * @param clazz
 *            utility class to verify.
 */
public static void assertUtilityClassWellDefined(final Class<?> clazz)
        throws NoSuchMethodException, InvocationTargetException,
        InstantiationException, IllegalAccessException {
    Assert.assertTrue("class must be final",
            Modifier.isFinal(clazz.getModifiers()));
    Assert.assertEquals("There must be only one constructor", 1,
            clazz.getDeclaredConstructors().length);
    final Constructor<?> constructor = clazz.getDeclaredConstructor();
    if (constructor.isAccessible() || 
                !Modifier.isPrivate(constructor.getModifiers())) {
        Assert.fail("constructor is not private");
    }
    constructor.setAccessible(true);
    constructor.newInstance();
    constructor.setAccessible(false);
    for (final Method method : clazz.getMethods()) {
        if (!Modifier.isStatic(method.getModifiers())
                && method.getDeclaringClass().equals(clazz)) {
            Assert.fail("there exists a non-static method:" + method);
        }
    }
}

I have placed the full code and examples in https://github.com/trajano/maven-jee6/tree/master/maven-jee6-test