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Rich Reporting for Important Plugins

Discussion: https://github.com/support-and-care/maven-support-and-care/discussions/180

Original Item: "Provide rich (HTML, nice print/pdf support, including graphs, …) reporting for important plugins like surefire, jacoco, spotbugs, ... (Hendrik)"

Note (Green): "Report Output in general independent of the Maven site plugin"

Problem Statement

There are several well-known plugins for Maven (surefire, jacoco, spotbugs, ...) that provide reports. While those reports are all machine-readable, there is not always a well-designed human-readable report.

Current State / Starting Point

The different plugins provide different levels of reporting for humans. Some plugins provide HTML reports, but those are often not very nice to read.

Expected Outcomes / Benefits

Provide rich reporting for important plugins. In the best case we provide a generic reporting framework that can be used by all plugins.

Discussion Summary

There was skepticism about creating a generic reporting framework (cf. xkcd #927), with a suggestion to improve existing reports individually rather than building a new abstraction. The question was also raised whether the reports are produced by the plugins or the underlying tools themselves, which affects the scope of what Maven can improve.

Final Discussion (2026-03-03)

  • Discussion:
  • Reports are rather build related (interesting to the developer of the respective component, not the consumer of it)
  • Extend perhaps to GitHub actions output/reporting (or other build process)
  • Decision: Request Funding