We’ve just moved to a new master pom file in an effort to make our lives a bit easier, and to allow certain builds to carry on using the old master pom file which was basically quite rubbish. You see, the old master pom file just defined a load of plugins, mostly in the plugin management section, so they had to be referenced by the application poms anyway. The idea with the new master pom is that it enforces the use of certain plugins, and ALSO enfiorces certain standards for builds to pass – for instance, we included a cobertura coverage rate of 80% and made the builds fail if there were any findbugs issues. It sounded like a good idea at the time. So, we put these plugin definitions directly into the build section of the pom, like so:

<build>

…

<plugins>
<plugin>
<artifactId>maven-compiler-plugin</artifactId>
<configuration>
<source>1.6</source>
<target>1.6</target>
</configuration>
</plugin>

<plugin>
<artifactId>maven-surefire-plugin</artifactId>
<version>2.4</version>
<configuration>
<testClassesDirectory>
build/maven/${artifactId}/target/test-classes
</testClassesDirectory>
</configuration>
</plugin>

<plugin>
<groupId>org.codehaus.mojo</groupId>
<artifactId>cobertura-maven-plugin</artifactId>
<version>2.4</version>
<configuration>
<formats>
<format>html</format>
<format>xml</format>
</formats>
<check>
<totalBranchRate>54</totalBranchRate>
<totalLineRate>75</totalLineRate>
</check>
</configuration>
<executions>
<execution>
<goals>
<goal>clean</goal>
<goal>check</goal>
</goals>
</execution>
</executions>
</plugin>

<plugin>
<groupId>org.apache.maven.plugins</groupId>
<artifactId>maven-pmd-plugin</artifactId>
<version>2.5</version>
<executions>
<execution>
<goals>
<goal>check</goal>
<goal>cpd-check</goal>
</goals>
</execution>
</executions>
<configuration>
<linkXref>true</linkXref>
<targetJdk>1.6</targetJdk>
<sourceEncoding>utf-8</sourceEncoding>
<failOnViolation>false</failOnViolation>
<outputDirectory>build/maven/${pom.artifactId}/target/pmd-reports</outputDirectory>
</configuration>
</plugin>
<plugin>
<groupId>org.codehaus.mojo</groupId>
<artifactId>findbugs-maven-plugin</artifactId>
<version>2.3.1</version>
<!– NOT USING THIS YET
<executions>
<execution>
<goals>
<goal>check</goal>
</goals>
</execution>
</executions> –>
</plugin>
</plugins>
</build>

The first thing I had to do (as you can see) is disable the check goal because it was causing findbugs to fail pretty much every build. The next thing I had to do was remove the whole of the following configuration section from the findbugs plugin:

<configuration>
<threshold>High</threshold>
<effort>Max</effort>
<xmlOutput>true</xmlOutput>
<xmlOutputDirectory>build/maven/${artifactId}/target/site</xmlOutputDirectory>
</configuration>

I’ve kept this section in the reporting section though.

The next thing I got was this error:

and that was fixed by changing this bit of the findbugs plugin configuration:

<effort>Max</effort>

to this:

<effort>Default</effort>

So, in short, using “Max” gives us java out of memory exceptions. Which is not exactly convenient. Not sure how to fix this though.