[findbugs is the example here, question is applicable to any such maven plugin]

I attended a build lecture not long ago and a pattern that was talked about that I quite liked was: when adding a new tool to the chain and you start with n violations, you should keep n decreasing (a high water mark) and fail the build only when current check exceeds the last value of n.

findbugs has just been introduced to our build and we were looking for a way to implement this pattern. We couldn't see any way to do it via the plugin configuration, so was curious if anyone out there could mention how they have achieved this. I guess the obvious way is to customize the plugin, but before we go charging ahead, would like to hear thoughts from others.