A trend in software reliability engineering is to take into account the coverage growth behavior during testing. A coverage growth function that represents the coverage growth behavior is an essential factor in software reliability models. When multiple competitive coverage growth functions are available, there is a need for a criterion to select the best coverage growth functions. This paper proposes a selection criterion based on the prediction error. The conditional coverage growth function is introduced for predicting future coverage growth. Then the sum of the squares of the prediction error is defined and used for selecting the best coverage growth function.