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. :)