New Maven Plugin: Junit Awards!

In my previous project I proposed a monthly award for promoting junit testing. None of the team members had written Junit Tests before (seems like it's not very common in IT consultancy) and they mostly see them as a waste of time. But soon they realized how usefull they are.

For encouraging them I proposed to give a free evening for the member that wrote the most tests in a month time. It was fun and developers, despite their lack of experience unit testing, created a good bunch of tests. Maybe the test weren't that good or complete, but at lest we had tests that could run every night.

The bad part: I did the test count by hand. It was only once a month and didn't expent much time anyway.

But fear not! If you are interested in doing something similiar I present you.

The Junit Award Maven Plugin

This plug in scans the entire src/test/java fould of your project searching for the @author tag of javadoc, getting the author name and increasing the count for it. Kind of simple for now.

The @author tag must be enclosed in a javadoc block like:

/**
* @author ggefaell
/*

/**
* @author Guillermo Gefaell
/* 

It generates a simple html page with the results.

For now i'm still seeing how to get the plugin to be avaliable at a repository, but you can follow this steps for runing it on your project.

1. Add the plugin to your project's pom. 

   	<plugin>
   	<groupId>com.github.konum</groupId>
   	<artifactId>junitaward-maven-plugin</artifactId>
   	<version>1.1</version>
   	</plugin>

   view raw gistfile1.xml hosted with ❤ by GitHub
2. Run mvn junitward:awards on your project.
3. The results are generated in the folder /target/junitaward/junitAwards.html

The next improvements are:

• Get it to a repository so no forking-installing. Done
• Add a "Since Date" parameter so you can know how many tests have been written in a time span.
• Improving @author scan so it counts only in functions noted with @Test.

Hope you like it!

Edit: Chanded groupId to com.github.konum and deployed it to central repository, so you can use it directly as a plugin in your project's pom.

Edit 2: Version 1.2 is out! Thre optional parameters for the plugin for count tests since a given date, change tests root folder and a date pattern option. See more at githubproject. https://github.com/konum/JUnit-Awards