My initial intention was to write a post on the plans for Sonar in 2011 and the associated roadmap. I started by quickly listing what was achieved in 2010. But after thinking about it, I realized that so much happened last year that it was worth to dedicate it an entire post !

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With version 2.0, Sonar now embarks the seventh and last axis of source code quality : Design & Architecture. The objective of this post is to start discussing what it can be used for and why it is so important.
To know if the design of your software is in a good shape, having a sense of observation and a good memory can most of the time do the trick. No real need to use a tool (whether it is UML diagrams, Sonar…) or to look at source code. If month after month, your software is able to evolve as quickly as the business requires and can handle the changes at a constant cost throughout time, then you can confidently conclude that the design of your application is in a good shape (and believe me, it is fairly unusual in the software development market !). If not, you should focus some attention on design as it is not going to get better over time and will become costly in the medium to long term.
To handle fearlessly upcoming changes, it is key that the software design has great modularity. That is to say, you can replace part of the system by a new piece of code with little pain. Reaching true modularity can only be achieved in a programming environment that has two main capabilities (two dimensions) : ability to assemble pieces of software and ability to recursively split a piece of software. However, these capabilities are necessary but not sufficient.

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The Sonar team is very proud to announce Sonar 2.0, the first release of 2010. As announced in a previous post, the main feature in Sonar 2.0 consists of analyzing Design : Architecture and object oriented metrics. This enables to report on the “7th deadly sin of the developer” that was missing so far in Sonar. As a reminder, here are the first six deadly sins : low coverage by unit tests, bad complexity distribution, potential bugs, duplicated code, lack of comments and non respect of coding standards.
As it is now a tradition, here is a presentation of the new features in screenshots. Enjoy !

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A change of year always gives to teams an opportunity to look back and measure what was accomplished… and then to start thinking of what the new year should be made of. I thought I’d share the output of the Sonar team retrospective.

At the end of 2008, very few people knew Sonar. The platform was made of a small community of early and eager adopters who were supporting the product strongly by giving feedback, asking for more functionality, making suggestions and testing new versions. It was also made of Sonar 1.5 that, looking back, was the foundation version of the platform. From this version, here is what was achieved in a year :

• A dynamic development activity on Sonar core with 7 major releases since 1.5.
• The transformation of Sonar from a tool to an extensible platform with more than 20 extension points.
• More than 30 open source plugins have been build to extend Sonar core using those APIs, and more that are not open source.
• the number monthly downloads has been multiplied by 10 during the year from 300 to 3,000.
• Sonar has been given a heart called Squid that makes Sonar much more than an integration tool. Several metrics that do not exist elsewhere are calculated by Squid.
• More than 4’000 emails exchanged on mailing lists and 1,000 Jira issues created.

So after all this, what could be an exciting challenge for 2010 ? We have set ourselves 2 very ambitious objectives for 2010 which should make the Sonar community continue growing :

• Design analysis : we like to say that there are seven technical axes of code quality analysis (we call them the seven sins of the developer). Sonar currently covers sixth of them and the last one is for us the most important one with unit tests : Design & Architecture. Sonar 2.0 planned for February will start covering the 7th axis with O.O. metrics like LCOM4, RFC, DIT … cycles detection and DSM at package and class levels. All those information will be of course provided by Squid. Moreover, an architecture rule engine should quickly appear after Sonar 2.0.
• Multi-languages : last but not least, give a real go at other languages. By the end of the year, we expect that plugins are available to cover properly : Java, PL/SQL, Flex, C/C++, Cobol, PHP and maybe more :-)

Here is a part of the program for 2010. I have now to leave you to start working on this as I think I will not have much spare time this year !