Considerations

How you make use of Cover Reports will clearly depend on many factors. As a Cover Reports User, consider the following when deploying and using Cover Reports. You may also wish to discuss these with your Cover Reports Administrator (deployment) and Cover Reports Contributors (reports bundles), as appropriate.

Deployment

When deploying Cover Reports, consider the following features:

• Authentication: By default, any Diffblue Cover user can upload reports bundles to Cover Reports. However, you may want to restrict and/or secure access by enabling upload authentication. For example, you may want to restrict upload to your CI processes only, so that the data and upload timings are consistent. If upload authentication is enabled, all uploads will need to use the defined username and password when uploading reports bundles.

• Telemetry: Cover CLI and Cover Plugin both capture anonymous usage data to help improve Cover services and features. This data can also be sent to your Cover Reports instance by enabling and configuring the Cover Reports endpoint for telemetry data, allowing you to monitor Diffblue Cover usage across your organization. Telemetry configuration can be managed centrally as detailed in Configuration options.

Reports bundles

When generating, naming, and uploading reports bundles, consider the following:

• Generate & Upload - Timing: You can generate and upload reports bundles before, during, and after code development. For consistency, you may wish to define specific schedules and you may also find it useful to generate and upload reports for your project before you run dcover create on the project for the first time (useful for setting a coverage baseline).

• Naming Conventions: The --name, --project-name and --location arguments are used to structure the uploaded data within Cover Reports. Diffblue recommends that you select an appropriate and consistent naming convention to help with data visualization in the Cover Reports UI. Alternatively, don't use these options and allow the data to be auto-generated.

• Cover CLI and/or Cover Pipeline: Reports bundles can be uploaded using Cover CLI (as part of a developer's process) and/or Cover Pipeline (as part of a CI workflow/pipeline). As an organization you may want to consider whether you use one method for upload, or both. If you're not sure or have concerns, you could use different naming conventions for the uploads to separate the data within the Cover Reports UI.

• Deleting Projects and Runs: You can delete a project and associated data from the Cover Reports Home page, and delete individual runs and associated data from the Runs drop-down menu. You should consider your delete actions carefully as data can't be recovered, once deleted.