Hi all,
A recent interesting activity assigned to me at work, once again brought out the mechanic in me 🙂 I’m the sort of guy who likes to get his hands dirty with a various tools to get my tasks done and I was excited and rearing to go!
Task : Query the coverity server after every coverity build and display a table of outstanding issues (consisting of high, medium & low impact defect count in various modules) within the Jenkins email notifications.
Hmmm… This is a simple one I felt.. The overconfident me 😉
I quickly jotted down my plan!!
- Query Coverity Server to get the list of outstanding issues.
- Export queries to excel sheets
- Use some simple logic to get total impact count of issues
- Append table & send mail!
Though the task on the outset looked like a fairly simple one, on closer evaluation it seemed that there were some challenges in it. For a start the coverity server did not have a good query mechanism provided by means of %installation_folder%/bin/cov-manage-im.exe. The query gave us a list of issues with 8 fields i.e stream name, cid, checker, status, classification, owner, severity & action.
There was no field which stated the ‘Impact’ of the issue! How could this happen I thought. I tried querying the server in many different ways. No good! To make things worse I was not able to get the filenames in the same query along with 8 other fields.
The overconfidence melted completely after spending almost a day experimenting with various queries and not finding the optimum one… The best I could get was 2 queries :-
- Query 1 : Gave me a csv with list of files with the above mentioned 8 fields
“C:\Program Files\Coverity\Coverity Static Analysis\bin\cov-manage-im.exe” –mode defects –stream %stream_name% –host %hostname% –port 8080 –user%username% –password %password% –show –status New –status Triaged –action “Undecided” –action “Fix Required” –action “Fix Submitted” –action “Modeling Required” >%path to csv%\detailed_query.csv
- Query 2 : Gave me a list of filenames one below the other.
“C:\Program Files\Coverity\Coverity Static Analysis\bin\cov-manage-im.exe” –mode defects –stream %stream_name% –host %hostname% –port 8080 –user %username% –password %password% –show –fields file –status New –status Triaged –action “Undecided” –action “Fix Required” –action “Fix Submitted” –action “Modeling Required” > %path to csv%\issues_filenames.csv
From csv1(Query 1) we get a Column named “Checker” with various fields in it. There is a reference document provided in C:\Coverity\Coverity Static Analysis\doc\en\cov_checker_ref.pdf. This gives a mapping of the impact for the given Checker Field.
So with the help of these 3 files I was able to create a summary report something like this. I filled in the Legacy defects part and this will serve as a benchmark for further builds.
Suspense!! – I will not reveal all my secrets of how I proceeded on my job from this point onwards. It is quite obvious that I used some sort of scripting language to automate my tasks namely :-
- Run queries to get 2 csv files.
- Compare the checkers with the checker ref file and assign an impact to it
- Use some logic to get the final count of high impact, medium impact and low impact issues.
- Populate the summary report which for me was in excel(xls) format.
- Embed this report within Jenkins email notification
- Send mail 😀 😀
I assure you that the learning curve is higher when you figure out how to do these tasks…Each in one’s own style will be able to innovate and find awesome solutions :).
This task sure was a reminder to me that challenges in IT are not how it seems. It might be a simple thing that you might be asked off. Never be overconfident or underconfident … Just wear a smile on your face and say “Yes.. I will do it…After an initial evaluation of the task” 🙂
You’re generous feedback and comments are always welcome. If you run into any roadblocks do let me know.
Regards,
VJ