I'm playing with the wonderful FindBugs plugin for Hudson. Ideally, I'd like to have the build fail if FindBugs finds any problems. Is this possible?
Please, don't try and tell me that "0 warnings" is unrealistic with FindBugs. We've been using FindBugs from Ant for a while and we usually do maintain 0 warnings. We achieve this through the use of general exclude filters and specific/targeted annotations.
You can not rely on find bugs so much , it is just an expert system that tells you that something may be wrong with your program during runtime. Personally I have seen a lot of warning generated by findbugs because it was not able to figure out the correctness of code (in fact).
One example when you open a stream or jdbc connection in one method and close it in other, in this case findbugs expecting to see close() call in same method which sometimes is impossible to do.
Maybe you've already seen this option, but it can at least set your build to unstable when you have greater than X warnings. On your job configuration page, right below the Findbugs results input field where you specify your findbugs file pattern, should be an 'advanced' button. This will expand and give you an "Unstable Threshold" as well as Health Reporting that changes Hudson's weather indicator for the job based on the number of warnings.
I wouldn't want my build to fail, but unstable seems reasonable if you are maintaining 0 warnings (and presumably 0 test failures).
The hudson way is to use unstable and not fail for something like this. However if you really do want your build to fail, you should handle this in ant.
<findbugs ... warningsProperty="findbugsFailure"/>
<fail if="findbugsFailure">
As Tom noted, the provided way to do this is with the warningsProperty of the FindBugs ant task.
However, we didn't like the coarse control that gave us over build failure. So we wrote a custom Ant task that parses the XML output of FindBugs. It will set one Ant property if any high priority warnings are found, a different property if any correctness warnings are found, a third property if any security warnings are found, etc. This lets us fail the build for a targeted subset of FindBugs warnings, while still generating an HTML report that covers a wider range of issues. This is particularly useful when adding FindBugs analysis to an existing code base.
One example when you open a stream or jdbc connection in one method and close it in other, in this case findbugs expecting to see close() call in same method which sometimes is impossible to do.
There are much better way to do this, glad findbugs is reporting it.