How to add jacocoagent.jar to Android build.gradle - Failed resolution of: Lorg/jacoco/agent/rt/internal_3570298/Offline;

Question

I have following setup

• AGP 7.x+
• Kotlin 1.5.x+
• JaCoCo 0.8.7+
• Java 11 set as the JDK
• Java 1.8 set as jvmTarget and compileOptions

but when trying to run the AndroidTest and generate jacoco report, it fails with

java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError: Failed resolution of: Lorg/jacoco/agent/rt/internal_3570298/Offline;

After doing my research it seems I need to add jacocoagent.jar to classpath, but how?

Tried adding testImplementation 'org.jacoco:org.jacoco.agent:0.8.7' and also downloading jar file from search.maven.org/artifact/org.jacoco/org.jacoco.agent/0.8.7/jar and adding jacoco-agent.properties file referencing the jar but no success :/ what am I missing...

(things I've looked into:

Removing Jacoco library dependency while exporting project as jar

how to prevent jacoco instrumenting production code?

https://issuetracker.google.com/issues/37116868 )