Maven: A Developer's Notebook

Generating a Quality Dashboard

You've seen how to generate some quality reports, such as a testing report, a test coverage report, a best practice violations report, and duplicate code reports. There are actually lots of other Maven reports related to quality (for instance, JavaNCSS, JDepend, and JCoverage, to name a few). Having all those reports generated is great, but it's a bit difficult to get a clear picture of the overall quality of a project. In addition, all these plug-ins generate reports for single projects and not multiprojects. How do you get aggregated quality reports that span a complete multiproject?

How do I do that?

In the previous labs you added reports to the qotd/core subproject. Now you'll use the Maven Dashboard plug-in to provide quality visibility to the full QOTD multiproject.

Add the maven-dashboard-plugin report to the reports section in your master project's POM. For the QOTD multiproject this is the qotd/project.xml file. Now tell the Dashboard plug-in what subprojects to include in the report. By default the Dashboard plug-in uses the values from the following three multiproject properties, seen in Chapter 3 and shown here with their default values:

maven.multiproject.basedir = ${basedir}
maven.multiproject.includes = */project.xml
maven.multiproject.excludes =

In the case of the QOTD multiproject, these default values are fine because all the subprojects are matching the */project.xml pattern.

The Dashboard plug-in introduces the notion of aggregators ...