Java Power Tools

Chapter 26. Monitoring Build Statistics

Introduction

There are many open source reporting tools available that can give you useful information about your project. Checkstyle, PMD, and FindBugs analyze the project source code, looking for code that fails to respect coding conventions or contains errors. Cobertura reports on test coverage, giving you an idea of how well your code has been tested.

All of these tools can provide detailed information about one particular aspect of your project at a particular point in time. However, it can also be useful to see how these statistics evolve over the lifetime of a project. Does the average code coverage increase or decrease? How does the number of errors detected by PMD and FindBugs evolve over time. How much code has been added to the project over the last month? For this type of query, a snapshot analysis of your project will not be enough—you need to study the data over time.

There are many tools that can help you in this area. QALab collects data from these tools and reports on the evolution of these statistics over time. For example, you can visualize the evolution of code quality and test coverage statistics over the life of the project. In this chapter, we will look at some tools that you can use to collect and display this sort of time-related statistical data.

QALab

QALab collects data from tools such as static analysis results and code coverage, and reports on the evolution of these statistics over time. For example, you can visualize ...