The plugin fails a build if no coverage.xml is created. That's pretty annoying because i do not always create coverage reports, just in some cases by profile. So my builds run, only the coverage.xml file does not exist if cobertura did not run. Then the hudson-plugin tries to find the coverage.xml (what is not possible) and marks my build as failed. For now i have to avoid this by disabling the checkbox "publish cobertura reports" temporary for those builds i do not want to run cobertura. Maybe the plugin shouldn't mark builds as failed when there is no coverage.xml file or there should be even a setting for that, because always disabling the setting or always running cobertura cannot be a solution.