There was recently a very good article on the blog of Zauber, a company that creates software in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Mariano has written about his experience of developing a Sonar plugin for internal needs. He goes from a very high level view on the API to some implementation details. I recommend this article in case you want to build a plugin yourself : Zauber Code: Creating a Sonar Plugin for software development metrics
There have been numerous debates around commented-out lines of code (line or block of code that was commented out at some point) and whether they should be left in the code or taken out. The outcome of those debates is almost systematically that they should be taken out sooner rather than later : in the Sonar Team, we generally consider than later means after code check in.
Here are the main reasons why old commented-out code is an abomination :
But the worst of all is in my opinion the fact that commented-out code appeals commented-out code, similarly to The Broken Windows Syndrome ! All this was reinforced by Uncle Bob a few months back in his Clean Code Tip of the Week #7.
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After the integration of two Google components (Motion Chart and Timeline), we are releasing the last of a series of three nice and sexy plugins : The Sonar Radiator Plugin, aka big treemap. Read the rest of this page »
The radiator is available in the home page as well as on the project dashboard. It works the same way the standard treemap does : you can choose pretty much any metric to represent the size of rectangles and any qualitative metric for their color.
Ross Row won last week the Atlassian Codegeist Competition in the OpenSocial Gadget Category with his Sonar Gadget. Congratulations to Ross who has done a great job so far working on the Sonar integration with the Atlassian suite.
This integration is well summarized by Jesse Gibbs in his article Put Sonar Gadgets on your JIRA Dashboard ! where he also mentions the two new Bamboo Sonar Plugins.
Straight after the Motion Chart, the Google Visualization Annotated TimeLine component gets integrated to Sonar with the Timeline Plugin.
This is really a great addition to the TimeMachine functionality as this component offers a higher flexibity : you can select up to 3 metrics and then view their evolution throughout pre-defined periods (last 5 days, last month…) or a custom period. The functionality is as usual available for projects, modules and packages.
Last week, the most sexy plugin of the Sonar forge was released : the Motion Chart plugin ! This animated bubble chart as I used to call it can handle up to 4 custom dimensions throughout time : X-axis, Y-axis, color and size of the bubbles. Read the rest of this page »
Once installed, a new link “Motion chart” is available both on the Sonar home page and on each project to respectively play with all projects or all components of a given project. It is really impressive to see bubbles moving along with time and code quality evolution.
The WTF per minute has become a buzz in the past few weeks and almost a kind of reference in the code quality world :-). Just for fun, a new version of the Sonar taglist plugin has been released to be able to count the number of time "// WTF" has been cried and written in the source code. With a small addition to the plugin, it would even be capable of reporting on a density of WTFs by minute, hour, day… but shortest jokes are the best.
Despite all its noisy strengths, the WTF suffers from a major weakness : it is a human based judgment at a certain point in time and space. That is why, this can be complemented with an other plugin to evaluate the technical debt of a project. Between the two plugins is going to be the truth !
The community has started several months ago to request a plugin to group / aggregate projects in Sonar. This plugin was released a couple of days ago under the name : Sonar Views Plugin. It is a commercial plugin edited by SonarSource that goes beyond the community initial expectations.
The Views Plugin enables to create any kind and any number of aggregation trees. Here are few examples :
We’re happy to announce the release of Sonar 1.11. This new version contains more than 60 issues that have been resolved amongst which improvements, bug fixes, technical migrations and also several new features. Here are the most important ones in screenshots : Read the rest of this page »
We brought back a little pinguin from Open World Forum last Friday !
