After a Sonar analysis, it’s easy to see your project’s current state – just browse to the project dashboard and it’s laid out for you. Want details? Just start clicking. But it’s not always enough to know where you are. Sometimes, you need to know where you are in comparison to where you’ve been.

If code coverage is at 50%, is that a good thing, or a bad thing? On the face of it, you’d probably like a higher score, but if you’re up from 30%, it’s time for back slaps and high fives. Down from 70%? Time for some soul-searching.

The fact that Sonar’s differentials make it easy to tell the difference is what I love most about Sonar. The fact that differential views are now available in four different places is even more exciting.

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Welcome to the roundup of blog posts and pages that mentioned Sonar last month…

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The Sonar project was launched more than 6 years ago, and SonarSource, the company that develops and promotes Sonar, was set up almost 5 years ago. Since then, we at SonarSource have consistently focused on developing the platform, really staying in our role of Software vendor. Except for cases where we could bring a unique expertise, we have avoided providing consulting services for several reasons:

• We want to focus all our energy on improving the platform, and consulting would be very disruptive.
• We want to avoid the “easy” money to stay focused on the core of the business: the software.

Those reasons are good enough for not going into the consulting business, but there is another one that dwarfs them all in my opinion: there is a huge market out there for companies that want to run a business around code quality. And when there is a big market, it generally does not take long before numerous companies respond to market demands with rich offerings. We could certainly compete in such a marketplace, but it’s not what we do best. Therefore it’s clear to us: we should focus on developing the tool, and consultancy companies will execute on implementation services. This was our vision 5 years ago, and it has not changed!

I am amazed every day to see how many companies are considering Sonar as the next tool they will adopt massively. Amongst them are the biggest companies in the world. As an example, we know that at least 30 of the Fortune 100 companies (and we’re sure there are more) are using Sonar intensively across their organizations. Those guys need professional services to succeed in their implementations: they obviously need support for installation and configuration of the tool, but what they need first and foremost is help defining strategies and implementing processes around code quality. For example, they need help to:

• Define quality requirements and map them into a Sonar quality gate
• Define and implement the reporting necessary to execute on the strategy
• Define actions plan for remediation of existing issues
• Define a process to enforce actions plan
• …

Companies need professional services to succeed with Sonar – services we cannot offer, but would like to support. To that end, we have developed a SonarSource partnership program that provides partner support for the pre-sales process, complete access to our entire solution, discounts on our Editions, and some visibility on our web site.

For those who aren’t ready to come on board with this partnership program yet, of course you’re still welcome to do business around Sonar and use the user mailing list to share experience and provide feedback. But we hope you’ll join us in this partnership, to the betterment of your ventures and the Sonar community at large.

Welcome to the roundup of blog posts and pages that mentioned Sonar last month…

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Sonar is a super-radiator for code quality and as such, you can expect it brings value to all stakeholders in a development group. To achieve this, Sonar must be able to show only relevant information in a certain context and shut off the noise to facilitate investigation and decision making. In this post, I will show how to customize Sonar to fit your needs by:

• creating filters that choose components and metrics to report on
• building your own widgets and dashboards
• selecting default dashboards displayed
• using the notification services and stay tuned

To start customizing Sonar, you first need to log in.

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Welcome to the roundup of blog posts and pages that mentioned Sonar last month…

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This is it! After talking about it, internally at SonarSource, for 2 years and after a failed attempt last year, we are discontinuing the support of Java 5 runtime for the Sonar platform. Here are a few questions you might have on this:

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The Sonar team is proud to announce the release of Sonar 3.5. This new version includes new features that we believe are worth stopping your daily work for a couple of minutes to check out:

• Mapping of unit tests and covered code
• New rules on unit tests
• Extension of notifications scope
• Enhanced configuration of file exclusions
• Plugin group and dependencies in Update Center

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Welcome to the roundup of blog posts and pages that mentioned Sonar last month…

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I recently wrote a post to list what was accomplished on the platform last year. Today, I am doing the continuation with even more exciting stuff: what we are going to do this year! What will be the main innovations? How the ecosystem will evolve? Which technical challenges are we going to face?

Cartography

This is our most ambitious project for the year and I should start by explaining what it is about. Behind this word, we group many features based on the dependencies between methods, attributes, classes, files, modules, projects, teams, departments… Here are the first use cases that we’ll cover:

• Cross-sources navigation: ability to click in the UI on a method call to see its declaration, on an identifier to see its declaration, to click on a COBOL COPY preprocessing directive to see its content, to click on a C function declaration to know where this function is used…
• Ability to find out which files include a C library file, a COBOL Copybook…

From there, we aim to provide the tooling to define and manage the architecture of an overall application portfolio. But I am talking about 2014 already…

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