RE: [Cobertura-devel] How can I get involved....

[Mark D. <Mar...@sa...>]

*snip*

> Anywho - the purpose of this email is to see how I can get 
> involved. One
> gap in the product which I noticed (and may already be planned) is
> coverage statistics over time. I was thinking, unless this is on
> someone's plate already I could start to get familiar with 
> the code base
> and put together a plan of attack - an impact of sorts - and 
> propose to
> you all.

*snip*

> Please let me know if this is of interest. BTW - what is the typical
> process of getting involved? Hope I am not jumping the gun.

You're not jumping the gun at all.  I suppose the typical process of get=
ting involved is to find something you're interested in fixing/improving=
/adding and writing a patch for it.  I don't know of anyone working on s=
tatistics over time.  And it's definitely something that would be nice t=
o have.  You would definitely want to work with CVS, if you plan on maki=
ng any changes.  Some of the stuff I mention below applies to CVS but no=
t to the last release.

I guess the easy way to do it would be to name the XML reports based on =
the date and time they were created, and then you could parse a director=
y of these files and determine the change over time.  This wouldn't even=
 need to be a part of Cobertura--it could be a completely separate progr=
am.  Or maybe instead of reading the data from the XML reports, you coul=
d read it directly from cobertura.ser files.  (The ser file contains bas=
ically the same information as the XML reports.  The ser file contains s=
erialized classes from the package net.sourceforge.cobertura.coveragedat=
a.  If you choose to go this route, you would need to use these classes =
to read the serialized file.)

However, it might be better to modify the classes in the coveragedata pa=
ckage to natively support a time and date.  I'm not sure how this would =
work exactly.  Maybe you could tag the information in the ser file with =
a datestamp and then zero it out before running the next batch of tests.

I think it is important that this have a good user interface.  How would=
 the statistics be displayed?  As a line graph, maybe?  How would the us=
er tell Cobertura to create these reports?  Would they specify a "start =
date" and "end date"?  Would the report have a separate display for each=
 package?  For each class?  Would it have a way to show differences in t=
he source files?

Does that help you, any?

-Mark