New to Cobertura

Finally got to use Cobertura. I initially started working with the 1.9 build but then decided to use 1.9.4.1, which worked quite well. If I can, I'll always use the latest version.

Took me about a week of experimenting with it - in addition to other duties - to get a handle on the process for creating accurate Cobertura coverage reports.

Some of the things that got me during the initial week were: 1) 100% coverage reports (when I knew there wasn't 100% coverage), 2) using the ant tasks effectively, 3) having an incomplete cobertura.ser be generated by JBoss (in addition to a cobertura.ser.lock file), and 4) having cobertura work with my Eclipse instance where I'd run my junit/htmlunit tests.

For #1 I had to merge the originally created cobertura.ser files (when I instrumented the JAR files I needed) with the one created when running JBoss and the htmlunit tests through the Eclipse IDE. I ultimately used the cobertura ANT task cobertura-instrument to explicitly create a ser datafile while instrumenting, and then used cobertura-merge to merge the ser files together after running my tests.

For #2, I got to know the Ant Task Reference page from the cobertura sourceforge page, which was helpful.

For #3, I'd get an incomplete ser file created after running my htmlunit test cases against a running JBoss server with my deployed application. I'd always have a cobertura.ser.lock file too. One thing I noted was if I had been running multiple test suites after each other and data.zip files would be created. I would try to delete old ones and that seemed to solve most of my lock file issues.

For #4, I had to have Eclipse Helios with the development packages, along with the test packages I was using to test the application's admin interface. I was able to run suite test classes that would have up to 700 tests by running as Junit, and of course, I made sure JBoss was up and running with my deployed application; either created from my dev folder using a maven command or getting a build from Hudson. Either way worked.