Cobertura is gone and Clover is here


I have spent most of this week working on integrating Clover into our environment and ripping out Cobertura. I ran into a couple of issues along the way, but we are up and running now. First one thing I dislike about Clover is by default they will mess with the maven artifacts that you may intend to ship. I think this is actually a poor way to instruct people to configure it out of the box because you are basically saying you only run it every so often on different builds or you end up having to invoke maven multiple times or other associated hacks. I didn’t like any of those options as the idea is to fail the build if coverage drops below the acceptable level and not accept the commit until that is addressed. Luckily I stumbled upon the clover2:instrument option that you can use instead of the default recommended clover2:setup goal. But then I hit a second problem, the way it names the instrumented classes with the clover2:instrument option seemed to be clashing with the JPA 2.0 Metamodel generator that we were using. I had sort of been looking for an excuse to rip that whole thing out of the project for a while and now I finally had that so I removed it from our software and replaced it with just reflection on the classes and used unit tests to verify at test time that the code wasn’t broken instead of the compile time checks we would get with the metamodel. With that gone clover integrated greatly and I got it wired into our Jenkins configuration. Today I was able to get our configuration manager to install the clover plugin into Jenkins instead of using the publish html report option and we have much nicer integration. With the Sonar Clover plugin we now have integration with Sonarqube. The Sonar plugin brings in the coverage but it no longer lists technical debt like the Cobertura does. So aside from that I think this is going to be a much better solution for us going forward and was glad we could finally switch.