SonarQube

About code quality analysis

Why?

Code quality analysis helps you to make your code:

• less error-prone
• more sustainable
• more reliable
• more readable
• more welcoming to new contributors

How?

Code quality analysis mainly relies on a set of tools that look at your code and give you hints. The most famous tools are Findbugs, PMD, Checkstyle; but also code coverage tools such as Jacoco. JDT itself provides very powerful quality checks, but there are not enabled by default. You should go to Error/Warnings in preferences and replace all "ignore" by "Warning". You can (and should) enable such tools in IDE.

Code quality can also be analyzed out of the IDE, running those tools and using their reports to find out the "hot spots" in your code.

About Sonar

Sonar is an open-source product which is used to gather several metrics about code quality, put them all in a single dashboard, and provide some tips to help you making your code better, more sustainable, more reliable, less bugged.

Sonar for Eclipse.org

Usage

Sonar can be found on https://dev.eclipse.org/sonar . Several projects already have quality reports enabled. You can drill-down on code to see Sonar annotations on each class, or navigate through the different widget on dashboard to focus on dedicated issues

Enable Sonar for your project

See http://mickaelistria.wordpress.com/2012/10/08/sonar-at-eclipse-org/ . You'll need a Tycho-based build, and a Job on Hudson sandbox to be able to push reports to Sonar

Infrastructure

Sonar is installed on a VM. It uses its embedded Jetty server to publish to HTTP, and uses a PostgreSQL database on the same VM.

The database is made accessible from Eclipse.org servers and has a user for Sonar, and another user for Hudson. When running the Hudson Sonar plugin, the plugin uses this user to push to the Sonar database the metrics about your project.