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Experiences in software development

5+1 Sonar Plugins you must not miss

Posted by Patroklos Papapetrou on July 10, 2011


Sonar, to my humble opinion, is the leading system to help developer teams track,manage and eventually enhance the overall quality of their code and obviously their software products/projects. To be honest, this is not a post to describe either Sonar features or the necessity of a tool for every developer that respect his time and efforts. If you want to read such analysis you can see my related post To Sonar or Not to Sonar. In this article I briefly present 5+1 plugins that every Sonar Installation should have them. I would like to clarify though some exceptions I have made prior to my final choice. I have excluded all plugins that have to do with additional languages and IDE to keep this post as much as objective I can. I have also excluded all commercial plugins for obvious reasons. After that assumptions I have limited my selections to the following categories :
  • Additional Metrics
  • Governance
  • Integration
  • Visualization / Reporting
Sonar itself comes with a variety of features that cover most of the needs of a software development team. However I consider that the following plugins are essential, especially for those that have adapted or trying to adapt agile practices. To be honest it was very difficult to select only 6 plugins!!
1.Hudson / Jenkins plugin
Although Sonar analysis can be easily triggered from several build tools (maven, ant etc.) I strongly believe that its native integration with the most famous open source CI server makes itself an important part of the continuous integration / deployment practice. The configuration is extremely easy and as proposed the best practice is to trigger Sonar at night builds. Team members can track day by day software quality, automatically, without bothering when a new analysis should run.
2.Jacoco Plugin
Unit Test results, with drill down analysis, line and branch coverage, running and failed tests are features implemented in Sonar core and cover in depth all aspects of unit testing practice. But, as there is always a ‘but’, what about Integration tests? What if we want to have separated measures about unit and integration tests? Here comes JaCoCo plugin to save our time and money. Although JaCoCo is an alternative to Cobertura (default Sonar coverage tool ), it may be properly configured to display metrics only for Integration Tests. There is a great article that explains in details how we can use it and get the same analysis ( as for Unit Tests ) for Integration Tests.
3.Useless Code Plugin
It may looks similar to the Sonar Core feature named Duplicate Code, but it adds some more metrics, which I think are very useful especially for large or legacy systems. In general it measures how many lines can be removed from your code. It reports what is the number of unused private methods that can be safely removed and the number of unused protected methods exist in the code that can be removed after some more careful code examination. Finally it provides some more details about code duplication informing how duplicate lines are formed (i.e. x blocks of y lines )
4.SIG Maintainability Model Plugin

This plugin, as its name implies is an implementation of the Software Improvement Group(SIG) Maintainability Model. It reports ranking – from — :(very bad) to ++ (very good) on the following base indicators:Analysability, Changeability, Stability and Testability. The core idea for this ranking is to measure a series of base metrics such as Lines of Code(LOC), Duplications,Unit Tests,Complexity and Unit Size. Each of these metrics is then accounted into some of the mentioned indicators and the final result is representing the overall maintainability of the project. We can see the results of this analysis in a graphical (spider) presentation with all four axes of the model. With a glance a this graph you have a global and detailed at the same time view of how easy is to change and maintain your codebase. For me it is the first index I check every morning and if something is not + or ++ then we definitely have done something wrong 😉

5.Quality Index Plugin
Have you ever wanted to check a single number (indicator) and understand how healthy is your project? I am sure you have!! Well, the quality Index plugin is exactly what you are looking for. The plugin combines four weighted axes (complexity, coding violations, style violations, test coverage) of quality and produces a ranking between 0 (lowest) and 10(highest). Moreover it calculates a method complexity factor based on the complexity factor mentioned above. Have you ever tried to get a ranking of 10 with this plugin? I think it worths the effort! 🙂

6.Technical Debt Plugin
Last, but not least, the plugin that reports about the interest you have to pay as a developer, as a team, as a company. Technical debt is a term invented by Ward Cunningham to remind us that if we don’t pay our interest from time to time, then it is for sure that eventually this will make our software unmaintainable and hard to add new features or even find the root cause of defect. The plugin, which has a very powerful configuration, represents technical debt in four dimensions.

  • Debt Ratio : The percentage of current technical debt to the maximum possible technical debt.
  • Cost to reimburse : Cost in your currency to pay all interest and clean up your code
  • Work to reimburse : Same as above measured in man days.
  • Breakdown : Distribution to the following axes: Duplication, Violations, Complexity, Coverage, Documentation and Design

Be sure that you check its measures to avoid find yourself in bad situation like spaghetti code 🙂

I am pretty sure that there are plenty of interesting Sonar plugins so please feel free to post your comments with your list of them.

This entry was posted on July 10, 2011 at 05:28 and is filed under open source, quality, software, sonar. Tagged: plugins, quality, software, sonar. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

5 Responses to “5+1 Sonar Plugins you must not miss”

  1. July 11, 2011 at 23:13

    awesome list….thanks Papapetrou P.Patroklos …i only was aware of the hudson plugin…..

  2. January 1, 2012 at 23:19

    […] by Patroklos Papapetrou on January 1, 2012 This post is a revision of the original post, published last year and it covered Sonar version 2.8. Many months has passed and during this […]

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