After serveral happy years without Maven, I am again confronted with a complex multi-module Maven build. My task is to create a simple Jenkins job that executes the unittests continuously, including a Cobertura code coverage analysis.
Surprisingly, there haven’t been any big changes neither to Maven nor to Cobertura within the last years - but still it took me some time of trying and googling to be sure that there is no beautiful solution for this rather simple task (the “documentation” of the Cobertura Maven Plugin is no big help).
My first try is a straight forward mvn install cobertura:cobertura, which basically works, and the Jenkins Cobertura Plugin displays the expected results. The downside of this is that since the Cobertura Maven Plugin uses its own lifecycle (which basically instruments the code, executes the tests, and generates the report), this causes all tests to be executed twice, which is (due to test execution time) not acceptable for my current project.
mvn -DskipTests install cobertura:cobertura doesn’t work as it skips the tests for both lifecycles. mvn cobertura:cobertura works well since Maven 3 (which can resolve submodule dependencies without installing them to the local repo), but sadly I am still stuck with Maven 2.
So in my case, the only solution is to run Maven twice:
mvn -DskipTests install
mvn cobertura:cobertura