Source Code Cross Reference

There are times when we wish to know right away the line number of the source code that caused a test to the fail. The Surefire Report Plugin has the capability to cross reference the source code that made the test fail. In order to activate this feature, the maven-jxr-plugin should be declared in the <reporting> section of the POM along with the maven-surefire-report-plugin. For more details, please read the documentation of the Maven JXR Plugin.

<project>
  [...]
  <reporting>
    <plugins>
      <plugin>
        <groupId>org.apache.maven.plugins</groupId>
        <artifactId>maven-surefire-report-plugin</artifactId>
        <version>2.19</version>
        <configuration>
          <!-- place your configuration here -->
        </configuration>
      </plugin>
      <plugin>
        <groupId>org.apache.maven.plugins</groupId>
        <artifactId>maven-jxr-plugin</artifactId>
        <version>2.1</version>
      </plugin>
    </plugins>
  </reporting>
  [...]
</project>

After executing mvn site for site generation, you'll notice that from the Failure Details section of the report, a link is available to redirect you to the source code that caused the failure.

In the figure below the code that caused the failure is com.test.proj.AppTest:36

The link will redirect you to the source by clicking it.