We’re happy to announce the availability of April’s release : Sonar 1.8. This new version, ready to go into production, contains several improvements and bug fixes. Here are the most important of them in screenshots :

Hotspots

This service enables at any level (project, module or package) to display the classes that have the most… and the less… Moreover, we are introducing a new metric that compounds code coverage and complexity of the class. This new metric’s objective is to highlight the classes to work on when you want to quickly increase your code coverage.

Read the rest of this page »

Sonar 1.7 has been released. This new version contains several improvements among which a much better compatibility with IE 6. On top of this, Sonar 1.7 has new features :

Exclude packages and classes

Most of the time, there is no need to evaluate generated sources. It is now possible to exclude them from analysis.

Viewing the unit tests results

Need to know which tests failed and why ?

Viewing lines that are duplicated

Coverage clouds on modules and packages

The functionality was already available at project level : it has been extended to modules and packages.

For more information, you can read the full release notes.

SonarSource experiments micro-blogging with Twitter ! The purpose is to compensate the absence of a developer blog for Sonar. The concept is really simple : the team publishes regularly short stories, less than 200 characters long. Some examples are :

• screenshots of features under development
• announce of milestone/beta releases (final releases are announced on this blog)
• various thoughts
• technological experimentation, such as “great, Sonar works with last Maven 2.0.10 !”
• fun stuff, like a movie on our subversion activity

To get this most up to date information, add SonarSource to the list of people you follow on Twitter. In case you don’t have a Twitter account, you can join today or subscribe to the feed. You can also follow directly some team members : Freddy Mallet, Olivier Gaudin or myself.

Sonar 1.6 has been released. On top of various bug-fixes and several improvements, it contains 3 new major features related to the management of quality profiles.

Define measure thresholds

It is now possible to define thresholds and to trigger alerts on metrics, for example if the code coverage is less than 35% or if complexity by class is greater than 40… On any metric, there are two levels of thresholds : warning and error

Read the rest of this page »

We have taken a few screenshots of the next release, just to make you want to try the 1.5 release candidate 1 !

Code coverage details

The Code Coverage report shows which lines of code were hit – or not – by unit tests. It works whatever the selected coverage tool, Cobertura (by default) or Atlassian Clover.

Improve Coding Rules Compliance

Simply visualize kinds of coding rules violations.

Clouds of risky classes

Mix complexity and code coverage measures to graphically discover which classes are the most risky. Big red classes are the most complex and the less tested.

Search Coding Rules

Search coding rules by name, plugin, activation level or category. Results can be exported in CSV format. Did you notice the name of the plugin selected in the screenshot ? Yes, it’s well-known Findbugs, integrated besides Checkstyle and PMD.

Search engine on projects

Quickly access to project dashboards. The search bar is always accessible from the header. Just start typing the name of the project you search.

Better Coding Rules Breakdown

Compare metrics on time machine

Compare trends of any measures on the same chart, for example to see if code coverage is related to complexity.

Centralized Atlassian Clover license

Simplify the Clover configuration, just copy the Clover license once in sonar and it will be available to all of your projects.

There are many more features and improvements. To find out more about them, have a look at the release notes and visit Nemo, the live instance of Sonar that is analyzing regularly open source projects, since it is now using the 1.5 release candidate 1.

Continuous integration (CI) has become a centerpiece of software development lifecycle. Since Sonar is implemented as a maven plugin, it can be easily integrated with any CI engine : the engine acts as the scheduler for Sonar’s daily runs. You can even imagine to use the well known but a bit outdated cron scheduler to launch the maven goal “mvn org.codehaus.sonar:sonar-maven-plugin:1.4.2:sonar” on each project you want to analyse.

At this point in time, you are probably wondering : ok, but why would I need a plugin to integrate Sonar with Hudson, the very popular, open source and easy to use CI engine ? Is it possible to get an even more seamless integration ?

Read the rest of this page »

You’re interested in Sonar but you don’t want to loose your time with its installation (even if it’s really simple ;o) ? Just have a look at Nemo, our public instance of the last version of Sonar. This is a new experience for us, so let’s say it’s a BETA service. We will see if performance and stability are acceptable enough without increasing hardware resources.



For your information, measures are realized on some open-source projects we selected among those criteria : use of subversion/maven2 and successful compilation.



http://nemo.sonar.codehaus.org