Viewing Overall Project Health

In the previous sections of this chapter, a large amount of information was presented about a project, each in discrete reports. Some of the reports linked to one another, but none related information from another report to itself, and few of the reports aggregated information across a multiple module build. Finally, none of the reports presented how the information changes over time other than the release announcements. These are all important features to have to get an overall view of the health of a project. While some attempts were made to address this in Maven 1.0 (for example, the Dashboard plugin), they did not address all of these requirements, and have not yet been implemented for Maven 2.0.

However, it should be noted that the Maven reporting API was written with these requirements in mind specifically, and as the report set stabilizes – summary reports will start to appear.

In the absence of these reports, enforcing good, individual checks that fail the build when they’re not met, will reduce the need to gather information from various sources about the health of the project, as there is a constant background monitor that ensures the health of the project is being maintained.