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List:       maven-dev
Subject:    RE: Extending reporting management
From:       "John Allen" <john_h_allen () hotmail ! com>
Date:       2006-08-16 19:19:12
Message-ID: 000801c6c168$db14a280$0401a8c0 () johnsxpc
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Sounds like an excellent proposal. I've been thinking for some time how we
might extend maven's reporting fwk to better support metrics management and
reporting. Have you considered the means of making this RDF data
distributable (and re-constitutable) via the maven artifact system?

John

-----Original Message-----
From: Hilco Wijbenga [mailto:hilco.wijbenga@gmail.com] 
Sent: 16 August 2006 17:16
To: Maven Developers List
Subject: Re: Extending reporting management

Hi all,

I'm nowhere near being a veteran Maven user let alone competent at
making changes to Maven but a common API for reporting seems like an
important and extremely useful addition to Maven and I'd like to help
out.

On 8/16/06, Arnaud Bailly <abailly@oqube.com> wrote:
:
<snip/>
:
> The basic idea I have in mind is thus to provide as a core maven
> service a central information API that would be used by **all** reporting
> plugins to attach information to structural elements of the
> project. This information could be store as a RDF (see also
> http://www.ilrt.bris.ac.uk/discovery/rdf/resources/) graph backed by
> a suitable ontology and extensible at will. The RDF structure would
> simplify most of the issues raised earlier in this text as it gives
> standard tools to query, aggregate and transform informations stored
> in the graph.

Sounds like a good idea.

> Aggregating information, for example, is trivial and can
> be done generically at *any* suitable level: If I need coverage percent
> for each method, I can query nodes relating to methods for a
> =test-coverage= predicate attached to this node and use the given
> object's value. Or I can use the same information by aggregating
> values at, for example, module scope, following links from module
> nodes to =test-coverage= predicates they lead to.

I've been looking for something that would allow me to generate a
single quality number. E.g. a weighted sum of successful unit tests,
code coverage, checkstyle violations, PMD violations.

> Another interesting aspect of this scheme is that RDF, having an
> external XML representation, is amenable to XSLT transformation and
> thus  can be used uniformly to generate human-readable reports without
> resorting to specialized handling per plugin.

One look and feel for all reports would definitely be a good thing.
Especially, if the look-and-feel is easily changed to reflect the
"company look-and-feel".

> Furthermore, storing this information in a versionned database would
> allow one to retrieve the *evolution* of the information attached to a
> project over time and various builds. This functionality is today provided
> by qalab plugin, once again in an *ad hoc* way.

Nothing beats graphs when trying to impress management. :-) I'd love
to be able to show progress in quality by means of the weighted sum I
mentioned above on a timeline.

> Comments are of course welcomed and sought after.

Well, here you go. I hope you're not too disappointed it's a
not-even-a-contributor replying. :-)

As I mentioned at the top, I'd like to help out with this. I'll start
by getting a Xen box ready for some serious Maven development. ;-)
We'll see what happens.

Cheers,
Hilco

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