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








Each time an alert is raised on a measure, this measure is highlighted in the Sonar home page and project dashboard








Any stakeholder of the project can subscribe to alerts through a RSS feed.

Quality profiles management

So far Sonar was only enabling to activate/deactivate and configure coding rules in a profile. From Sonar 1.6, a quality profile not only contains coding rules, but as well alerts definition.



Moreover it was not possible to properly backup and restore an entire profile, but only to export Checkstyle and PMD rules definitions. The profiles can now be fully backed up, including rules and alerts definition, and obviously fully restored. This enables for example an easy promotion process.

Quality profile by project

On top of the quality profile extension described above, we have added the possibility to activate several quality profiles simultaneously in order to explicitly associate a project to a quality profile.



This can be used to analyze a legacy application with a different profile than a brand new one, since expectations might not be the same







The selected profile is displayed in the project header







Those 3 features are an important step to make Sonar a tool that fully manages the source code quality rather than a tool that only reports on metrics.



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