Posted by Jeroen van Erp in the wee hours: March 27th, 2008
Quality is an everyday part of the life of a Xebia software developer. One of the ways to get insight into quality is by looking at metrics like FindBugs, PMD, Simian, Code Coverage, etc. With large software products consisting of different modules, quality assurance can become quite a trying task. This means that tools which alleviate this burden are a welcome addition to our toolbox.
The Maven 1.x dashboard is such a tool. The Maven site is integrated into our continuous integration process, and the dashboard that is generated provides a birds-eye view of a lot of our quality metrics. This is especially useful when dealing with multi-module projects. For the Maven2 build system a similar plugin is currently available on Codehaus. However this plugin is not final yet and in the past we had some trouble to get it to work. Therefore we decided to try and build our own plugin.
As our toolbox heavily leans on a lot of open source products, we decided to give something back to the community and release this plugin as an open source product. The dashboard plugin can be found at the following URL: http://mojo.os.xebia.com/maven-dashboard-plugin. On the site you can find many configuration examples.
In order to use the plugin in your pom, you’ll have to do some basic configuration. The following example shows what you need to add to your pom.xml
...
xebia-maven2
Xebia Maven2 Repository
http://mojo.os.xebia.com/repository
....
...
com.xebia.mojo
maven-dashboard-plugin
This configuration will generate a full dashboard when you run the build using the following command line:
mvn site dashboard:dashboard site:deploy
The result of the execution of this command for the maven dashboard plugin itself looks like this
The source code for the plugin is released in Subversion, and the Jira issuetracker can be found here.
Now that we’ve got a Dashboard for Maven2 projects, we can finally get the quality overview and focus on fixing quality assurance issues instead of finding them throughout the different modules of our projects.
Aggregating views are great. We have been using functionality in our preferred CI environment Hudson (Violations view) for quite some time now in a build environment that works on ANT+Ivy, custom generic macro’s and plugged in reporting (like PMD, FindBugs et cetera). A big bonus of ANT+Ivy is that the build process work ‘all’ the time without all the magic that often times messes up Maven.
[...] Maven 1 provided a dashboard that aggregated all the reports of your maven project in single page. As announced in this previous blogpost a Maven 2 dashboard that resembles the Maven 1 dashboard is available here http://mojo.xebia.com/maven-dashboard-plugin/. I recommend to use it so you get a nice overview on one page for your project. [...]
Nice work, a couple of questions:
Is this open source? Can I download the source from somewhere?
Are you accepting bug reports or patches? I’m getting a null pointer when running the surefire dashboard report against projects that have no tests. I’d like to submit a bug report or a patch to get this fixed.
Will you be uploading this into the maven central repository? I think that is a lot better than having to include a seperate plugin repository to point to your servers. It is mirrored for one thing.
Overall a very nice piece of work. I tried the standard maven2 dashboard but it is useless compared with the maven1 dashboard. You can get a fancy 3d cut away pie chart of the distribution of types of checkstyle error out of it, but not a simple at-a-glance fits-in-one-window cut-down-to-essentials table of figures. Your dashboard plugin beats the standard m2 one by miles. Well done and thank you.
Apologies for not reading the full article before posting. I see that it is indeed open source, Apache licensed, and can be downloaded from your subversion server.
[...] version fixed some bugs. A quick guide on how to use the dashboard in your project please read this blogpost. Keep an eye on this blog or checkout the roadmap in Jira for upcoming [...]
great! wish i would have seen this after the few days i’ve been messing about with codehaus’ plugin. One thing i immediately notice is that there doesn’t seem to be historic support in this dashboard. i haven’t dug in yet, so maybe i’m missing.
is there, and are there any plans for such?
Hi Jon,
No there is not a historic dashboard yet. We have some plans, but nothing concrete yet.
What I do to keep history is that I deploy the site to a different location per version. By using the ${version} property from Maven you don’t have change the location for each version. It is not ideal, but it is better than nothing.
Keep an eye on the roadmap for historic dashboard support.
Lars