Maven SNAPSHOT Traceability

So your scrum team is creating non-unique SNAPSHOT versioned artifacts throughout your sprint. How do trace that SNAPSHOT version back to a baseline that is of any QA relevance (build number, subversion revision, datetime stamp)?

<plugin>
 <groupId>org.apache.maven.plugins</groupId>
 <artifactId>maven-antrun-plugin</artifactId>
 <executions>
   <execution>
     <phase>generate-resources</phase>
     <configuration>
       <tasks>
         <tstamp>
           <format property="now" pattern="MM/dd/yyyy hh:mm" unit="hour" />
         </tstamp>
         <property name="build.version" value="${version} (private-${now}-${user.name})" />
         <property name="hudson.build" value="hudson-${BUILD_NUMBER}, subversion-${SVN_REVISION}" />
                         
         <!-- put the version file -->
         <echo message="The build id is: ${build.version}" />
         <mkdir dir="target/${project.build.finalName}/" />
         <echo file="target/${project.build.finalName}/version.properties">version=${build.version} ${hudson.build}
         </echo>
       </tasks>
     </configuration>
     <goals>
       <goal>run</goal>
     </goals>
   </execution>
 </executions>
</plugin>

...

<profiles>
 <profile>
   <id>release</id>
   <properties>
       <!-- for releases, just use the POM version. -->
       <build.version>${version}</build.version>
       <hudson.build></hudson.build>
   </properties>
 </profile>
</profiles>

This little piece of magic creates a version.properties file that contains some valuable information.

version=1.1.0-SNAPSHOT (private-04/21/2008 02:23-jblack), hudson-453, subversion-1124

When you do a formal release, specify the -Prelease profile to have this file simply hold the pom version.

For the plugin configuration above, this file gets put in a war project root webapp directory, suitable for immediate viewing from your browser!

The mad props for this idea go to Kohsuke. :)

Hudson Gadget For Google Desktop

I took a first stab at creating a google desktop gadget that can display the job names and statuses of any Hudson instance. Simply configure it to the Hudson server url and it will discover all the jobs and start polling the for blue dots.



Hudson Gadget, Version 0.9.0.

Let me know if you have any improvement ideas or other issues.

[update] This gadget has been contributed to the open source Hudson project.