Book Image

Sonar Code Quality Testing Essentials

By : Charalampos S Arapidis
Book Image

Sonar Code Quality Testing Essentials

By: Charalampos S Arapidis

Overview of this book

Sonar is an open source platform used by development teams to manage source code quality. Sonar has been developed with this main objective in mind: make code quality management accessible to everyone with minimal effort. As such, Sonar provides code analyzers, reporting tools, manual reviews, defect-hunting modules, and TimeMachine as core functionalities. It also comes with a plugin mechanism enabling the community to extend the functionality, making Sonar the one-stop-shop for source code quality by addressing not only the developer's requirements, but also the manager's needs.The "Sonar Code Quality Testing Essentials" book will help you understand the different factors that define code quality and how to improve your own or your team's code using Sonar. You will learn to use Sonar effectively and explore the quality of your source code in the following axes: Coding Standards Documentation and Comments Potential Bugs and Defects Unit Testing Coverage Design and Complexity Through practical examples, you will customize Sonar components and widgets to identify areas where your source code is lacking. The book goes down to proposing good practices and common solutions that you can put to use to improve such code.You will start with installing and setting up a Sonar server and performing your first project analysis. Then you will go through the process of creating a custom and balanced quality profile exploring all Sonar components through practical examples. After reading the book, you will be able to analyze any project using Sonar and know how to read and evaluate quality metrics.Hunting potential bugs and eliminating complexity are the hottest topics regarding code quality. The book will guide you through the process of finding such problematic areas, leveraging and customizing the most appropriate components. Knowing the best tool for each task is essential. While you improve code and design through the book, you will notice that metrics go high and alerts turn green. You will use the Time Machine and the Timeline to examine how your changes affected the quality."Sonar Code Quality Testing Essentials" will enable you to perform custom quality analysis on any Java project and quickly gain insight on even large code bases, as well as provide possible solutions to code defects and complexity matters.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
Sonar Code Quality Testing Essentials
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Sonar Metrics Index

Code coverage analysis


To better understand how Sonar works and to be in a position to better evaluate code coverage results, it is necessary to take a closer look at how code coverage tools analyze tests and calculate total coverage. The result of the coverage analysis process, although expressed as a single percentage number in Sonar, is based on many different coverage metrics.

Next, we will examine four fundamental coverage metrics used by all code coverage tools supported by Sonar:

  • Statement coverage

  • Branch coverage (also known as decision coverage)

  • Condition coverage

  • Path coverage

Statement coverage

Statement coverage is the most basic metric of the analysis process. It is the building block element for the rest of the metrics. The metric reports whether a statement was encountered during test execution. Usually, statements and lines coincide, thus the metric is also known as line coverage. Once a line of code is encountered, it is considered as covered. This has the side effect of not...