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Well we all know that code analysis is a very basic and important part of software development process . It doesn’t matter how much experience we have in software development , we usually end up in a code that contains some bugs ( though it is not our intention ) .
Though we use tools like debugger or profiler to ensure the code quality , the use of such tools comes late in the development process . I believe that code quality analysis should be done right after you write the source code , even without executing it . Such work can be done effectively by static code analysis tools . One should not take it as an alternate to code review process but can think it as an add-on to improve the code quality.
What is Code Analysis ?
Code analysis is analyzing the source code without executing it . The purpose is to find bugs or ensure conformance to coding guidelines . For example – Compiler showing lexical, syntactic and even semantic mistakes .
The code analysis is either done by the code reviewer or a static code analysis tool . I would say that both are equally important but this post is dedicated to the latter . The tool we are going to discuss here is Sonar.
Benefits
There are various benefits of code quality analysis . Some of them are :
- Code becomes more readable
- Less error prone
- More reliable
Introduction to Sonar
Sonar is an open source code quality analysis tool that analyzes the source code , gather metrics about code quality and put them in a dashboard . Apart from analyzing the code , it also provides some tips to make the code better .
According to SonarQube , it covers seven axis of code quality :
- Architecture and Design
- Complexity
- Potential bugs
- Code Duplication
- Unit tests
- Comments
- Coding rules
Sonar can be downloaded from http://www.sonarqube.org/downloads/
Sonar Dashboard
Sonar provide a comprehensive dashboard that provides high level metrics of a project .
Features
The sonar comes with a lot of features but all can’t be discussed here . But we can have a look at some basic features :
Unit tests inspection
Sonar inspects and validates the unit tests and provides the metrics on the dashboard .
Sonar also identifies the line coverage along with the uncovered conditional statements.
Quality Profiles
Can create quality profiles with different quality objectives on projects.
Issues Drilldown
Sonar provides a feature to drilldown the individual classes and identifying the problematic area . Sonar does a rule based defect identification and all the defects have a severity ( for example Blocker , Major ).
Application Lifecycle Management
Sonar integates easily with the Application Lifecycle Management tools like Maven , Jenkins , Eclipse and enables faster development.
For example-
Build Integration : Maven
Continuous Integration : Jenkins
IDE integration : Eclipse
Version Control : SVN
JIRA integration
Time Machine
Examine progress of the code using Time Machine . Motion Chart and Timeline and all these components can be dynamically customized .
Sonar supports numerous other features and to see all of them , click here.
