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

Prerequisites for Sonar


Before installing Sonar, it is necessary to check that our host system meets all the requirements.

Sonar comes bundled with the Apache Derby database, but it is highly recommended to use an enterprise database, especially when deploying on to a production environment. A minimum of 512 MB of RAM and sufficient data space to store Sonar's analysis results and historical data are required. The last requirement should not be an issue since the public Nemo instance of Sonar uses 4 GB of RAM to analyze more than 6 million lines of code within a two-year lifespan according to SonarSource. Users will interact with Sonar through web browsers and it is recommended to enable JavaScript if not already enabled. Finally, installing the Maven project builder is highly recommended to make the process of adding new projects for analysis much easier.

The following list presents all supported platforms by Sonar:

  • Java Oracle JDK

    • 1.5

    • 1.6

    • 1.7 (not tested yet)

  • Database

    • Microsoft SQL Server...