title: Is it safe to include cobertura instrumentation in production builds?
body: <p>Our organization is mandating the generation of code coverage reports using the maven-cobertura-plugin, for all code that needs to go to production.</p>
  
  <p>My understanding is that cobertura instruments the class files (modifies the bytecode) to enable calculation of code coverage. I have a few questions on how this works:</p>
  
  <p>1) If I configure the build to run the instrumentation goal, and use the same build to generate the EAR for installation on the production appserver, will the modified bytecode end up being deployed?</p>
  
  <p>2) If yes, will this cause any degradation in application performance due to the extra diagnostic code injected into the bytecode?</p>
  
  <p>3) Is it advisable to have a separate build job setup for cobertura instrumentation and code coverage report generation, so that it does not pollute the code to be installed in production?</p>
  
  <p>Your inputs are highly appreciated!</p>