What is the purpose of the rake cover_me:report task?

[sdhull]

It's not really clear to me what this does. Is it that it must be run after your tests in order for an accurate report to be generated? I find it odd that after running my test suite, my coverage report is opened in my browser (89% coverage, thankyouverymuch), but if I run rake cover_me:report after that, the coverage report is opened in my browser again, but with 92% coverage.

This would make sense to me if every file had increased somewhat in coverage (as my test suite runs rspec tests and then cucumber tests, and the initial coverage report is opened as the rspec tests are completed), but the numbers just seem to change after running rake cover_me:report: some go up, some go down. Doesn't that seem somewhat odd to you?

Also, a related question: is it possible to programmatically determine the overall coverage percentage? I would love to fail my build if it dips below some arbitrary threshold.

[markbates]

Sorry, was incredibly busy all day today. The point of the rake task is to bridge the gap between multiple tasks, such as specs and cucumber. Without it the data from each task was being lost. So this task lets you keep the data between them. It also is there to only report in the data when running all your tests, not just an individual one.

In terms of different percentages coming back, I can't really explain that. I can say that the rake task is not really meant to be run on it's one, but rather wrap the other tasks, so maybe that is part of the problem?

Finally, its not really possible to figure out the percentages during the running of tests, one because you would need to hook into what ever test framework you are using, and two we don't know how much code you have until the very end when the data is all aggregated. Make sense?