Introduction to SonarQube
SonarQube is an open-source web-based platform that is used to measure and analyze the quality of the source code. It makes the code more readable and more reliable. It is one of the leading tools for continuously inspecting the code quality and security of the codebase. Apart from inspection, it can guide development teams during code reviews.
How do we evaluate the code quality and the developer who has written the code? Below are the seven sections of code quality covered by SonarQube.
SonarQube covers the 7 sections of code quality
- Architecture and Design
- Unit tests
- Potential bugs
- Duplicated code
- Coding standards
- Complex code
- Comments
SonarQube receives files as input and analyzes them along with barriers. It then calculates a set of metrics, stores them in a database and shows them on a dashboard. This recursive implementation helps in code quality analysis.
Why SonarQube – Features
- SonarQube doesn’t just show you what’s wrong. It also offers quality-management tools to actively help you put it right.
- SonarQube addresses not just bugs but also coding rules, test coverage, duplications, API documentation, complexity, and architecture, providing all these details in a dashboard.
- It gives you a moment-in-time snapshot of your code quality today, as well as trends of lagging and leading quality indicators.
- It provides you with metrics to help you make the right decision. In nearly every industry, serious leaders track metrics. Whether it’s manufacturing defects and waste, sales, and revenue, there are metrics that tell you how you’re doing: if you’re doing well overall, or whether you’re getting better or worse.
What makes SonarQube really stand out is that it not only provides metrics and statistics about your code but translates these non-descript values to real business values such as risk and technical debt.
Now, let’s have a look at the benefits of using SonarQube.
Detects And Alerts
SonarQube detects bugs in the code automatically and gives alerts to the developers to resolve the issues before rolling it out for production.
Raise Quality
SonarQube performs multi-dimensional analysis and can generate results on seven sections of code quality mentioned above. It helps developers in avoiding code redundancy, maintain low code complexity.
Developers can create customizable dashboards to focus on the areas which are more important. It helps in on-time delivery of the quality product.
Sustainability
SonarQube platform significantly increases the lifetime of applications by reducing complexities, duplications and potential bugs in the code, by keeping neat and clean code architecture and increased unit tests. It increases software maintainability. It also has the ability to handle changes.
Productivity
SonarQube facilitates the team members to reduce the size of the application, code complexity, maintenance time and cost and make code easy to read and understand.
Increase Developer Skills
SonarQube provides enormous value to the development teams and hence it can be adopted easily. Developers receive regular feedback on coding standards and quality issues which helps in increasing the programming skills. It creates a good understanding of software quality and ensures code transparency.
Scale With Business Needs
There has been no limit discovered to its scalability yet as it is designed to scale with business needs.
SonarQube has been tested in environments. It performs daily analysis on more than five thousand projects with more than four million lines of code and twenty developers.
Enable Continuous Code Quality Management
Adopting SonarQube make code quality a well-recognized part of the development process. It enables continuous code quality management and decreases the cost and risk associated with software management. Developers receive valuable insights to ensure that this is broadly adopted.
Define And Increment Requirements Efficiently
It has a set of predefined standards that enable developers and software managers to get immediate insight into application quality. To adapt to the organization or team specific requirements, it can be configured easily.
Foster Innovation
As more companies migrate to the SonarQube platform, they increase in size as well as in diversity. This platform enables these companies to customize and extend its functionality. Companies can get an increasing number of plugins and an extensive developer’s network.
Reduce Risk with Vendor Support and Services
To enable customers to get maximum value from their investment, SonarQube provides additional value and professional support. Services including development, technical support, consulting and training are designed to help companies get long term benefits.