2009 starts like 2008 finished, with a good news for Sonar ! :-) Indeed, after being nominated as finalist in 2009 Jolt Awards, Sonar has been declared Codehaus featured project of the month for January.

For the ones who don’t know Codehaus : Codehaus is a forge that hosts open source projects, but only those that have a business-friendly license. I take the opportunity of this announce to remind people that Codehaus is certainly the best available forge for open source projects.

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When talking about source code quality, at first you might think that the only data of interest is the result of the last code analysis. However, you realize quickly that this information is not sufficient on its own and should be compared with similar data in the past.

Let’s pretend for a few moment that you get a new job as team leader of a development team and let’s make a few assumptions for the sake of argument : your main objective is to increase global quality/stability of applications and you are addicted to Sonar (probably not an assumption ;-)).

The first thing to be done is to analyze source code to quickly get a synthetic insight of the situation and define short term priorities. Therefore you take the following actions :

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Having a tool like Sonar to monitor source code and continuously evaluate risks is a good start. Nevertheless, Sonar should not only  be considered as a passive audit tool that can quickly help you scan your projects portfolio.

Sonar is the missing piece of a global source code management solution. We’ll progressively communicate on this fully Open Source integrated solution but for today, here are the first three components :

• Eclipse Ganymede
• Eclipse Checkstyle plugin eclipse-cs
• Sonar 1.4.3

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You might have already paid attention to this little and empty section named “Reviews” at the bottom right of any project dashboard, but what is this section about ?

Originally, this functionality was developped for one of our customer : this company has a quality assurance team in charge of regularly interviewing members of development teams on different areas like “Configuration Management”, “Project Planning”, “Technical Design”, etc. They already used Sonar to check and follow code quality on their projects portfolio and wanted to feed Sonar with the results of those reviews.

In Sonar 1.5 we’ve extended this to any kind of metrics which could be fed manually like “Team size”, “Business Value”, … But let’s go back to Sonar 1.4.X and the way this functionality can currently be used.

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Next week, on the 21st on 22nd of October, I am going to participate to the Valtech Days 2008 where I have been invited by Eric Lefevre. More than 300 participants are expected to this event, whose main topics are going to be this year : Agility, Industrialization and software factory, Java / .NET / SOA architecture, e-business and Web 2.0.

During the event, I am going to animate a session on “Industrialization of source code management” that I will co-present with Romain Linsolas,

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We’re pleased to sponsor and participate to * CITCON 2008  (Continuous Integration and Testing Conference) in Amsterdam. We will attend this conference for the first time and I’m a bit curious and looking forward to see how this technologic OpenSpace will behave with 150 expected participants.



It’s strange not to see Atlassian along with other sponsors like Anthillpro as they’ve just opened a new office in Amsterdam. I’d have been happy to meet guys from Atlassian to discuss about software quality and to know where they plan to go with the promising “Build Telemetry” feature integrated in Bamboo.



Since we have not been communicating much so far about young Sonar, this event is a good chance for us to start gathering feedback from the community.



* : “CITCON (Continuous Integration and Testing Conference) brings together people from every corner of the software development industry to discuss Continuous Integration and the type of Testing that goes along with it.“

As Sonar is an enterprise quality tool, it must scale well when number of projects and snapshots by project grow over time. We consider this capability to be a plain Sonar functionality. So we manage it as the others by launching regression tests on each new release and trying to tune performance from one release to the other.

Ok fine, but what means “scale” in Sonar’s context and what is the protocol used to measure this capability ? As a good coach, we decided to answer this question by asking new ones :

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