Description

Coverity Documentation
Version
latest

The cov-blame command computes the automatic ownership assignments based on SCM (source code management) history and owner assignment rules. The SCM history consists of when, where, and by whom the code was changed and the ownership rules derive the owner of an issue based on the SCM history.

This command requires that source files remain in their usual locations in the checked-out source tree. If the files are copied to a new location after checkout, the SCM query will not work.

There are two main use cases for this command:

  1. cov-blame is automatically called for owner assignment as part of the commit process.

    In this case, cov-commit-defects automatically calls cov-blame based on owner assignment rules provided to the Coverity Connect UI. cov-commit-defects invokes cov-blame to compute the ownership assignments. If the rule assigned to the stream requires SCM data, cov-blame first attempts to retrieve SCM data for files related to defects from the intermediate directory. If SCM data has not been imported to the intermediate directory, the command can directly query the SCM for the relevant history data using the --scm* options defined in cov-commit-defects. The assigned owners (SCM users) are then written back into the intermediate directory. cov-commit-defects then picks up the ownership assignment files and Coverity Connect sets the owner accordingly in the triage pane.

  2. cov-blame is manually invoked to test and compare ownership rules.

    You can invoke cov-blame to produce a report of owner assignments for defects to help you accomplish the following:

    • Verify, before you commit, that the automatic ownership is producing the proper/expected assignments. You can specify one or more owner assignment rules through the --owner-assignment-rules option for comparison.

    • To compare automatic owner assignment to the owners that are already defined in Coverity Connect. In this way, you can see how successful an owner assignment rule would have been for historical defects that have already been manually assigned in Coverity Connect.

    Before you run cov-blame, you must have a have an existing preview report or generate one using cov-commit-defects --preview-report-v2. You may also generate the report using cov-commit-defects --preview-report-v3.