Enterprise Development – What Is the Reporting Function?

There are some dangers with ad-hoc reporting.

1. Reports tend to proliferate in the resulting combinatorial explosion.

2. any report so-created has some built-in legitimacy because, well, it is a printed report, so the information must be valid.

3. You might think that providing reports in this way reduces your burden for supporting people with new reports, but in fact it increases it.

4. It's not just about giving people a reporting capability. It's also about document management: what is the retention and destroy policy for such documents? What are the filing and storage requirements?

For all of these reasons, I believe that, if a custom reporting tool is provided, it must be limited in scope; carefully structured so as not to produce excessive, unsubstantiated and unsupported artifacts; and backed up by a policy that clearly outlines what kind of reports can be generated dynamically, and what reports must be defined and produced formally.

In some cases, adding carefully chosen customization to existing reports (a small number of user-configurable parameters, for example) can reduce the need for a custom reporting tool. Also note that, if this is about performing research against an OLAP database, more reporting flexibility is needed than if you're reporting on an ordinary transactional system.

Since you already have your projects ready for Maven and Jenkins is installed, you may go one step further and install Sonar. It is an incredible code quality related tool, it performs Cobertura, Checkstyle, FindBug, and many other analysis tools at the same time. That way, the code quality reporting is done by Sonar, not by Maven or Jenkins.

You can install Sonar on the same machine where Jenkins is installed or somewhere else. If you just want to test it, you can just perform the standard install (it uses its own HSQLDB if you don't configure the database yourself) and you are almost ready to go. The last thing you need is to configure the relationship between Jenkins and Sonar.

There is done via the Sonar plugin for Jenkins. Once you have installed the plugin:

1. Indicate where Sonar can be located on the Jenkins configuration
2. For each build job you want to be analysed, go into the job configuration and check the "Sonar" checkbox.

Be careful for one thing: the analysis may be quite long for big projects. But then again, you may configure special nightly Sonar builds in addition to standard builds.

Hope that helped.