How do I troubleshoot "failing" Hudson builds?

Question

I have a job which runs successfully as a maven build, but fails when run in Hudson.

The regular output shows BUILD SUCCESSFUL but the build is marked as failed (red ball) and Cobertura reporting is skipped "because build was not UNSTABLE or better".

I tried putting a log recorder on hudson.model.Run, which shows that some process is setting the build status to failed (one to failed, then one to successful, then a second one setting it back to failed). However, this doesn't give me any insight into which process this is, or why it is doing that.

What can I do to troubleshoot the reason for and origin of this failure?

EDIT: The last few lines of my console output show the regular maven BUILD SUCCESS info messages, followed by:

channel stopped
Skipping Cobertura coverage report as build was not Unstable or better
Finished: SUCCESS

Answer 1

The failure of a build in hudson is determined by the last build step returning successfully (RC 0). Do you build this as a freestyle or maven project in hudson? If it is freestyle, is it the only process run?

Build failures in hudson can also come from failing post build steps such as collecting test result information, etc