SonarLint for Visual Studio version 1.2.0 was released this week. In this version we focused on improving the user experience by adding code fading and fixes. Code fading makes some issues less obtrusive, and code fixes are concrete suggestions for solving specific issues in the code. This means that when an analyzer identifies an issue in the code, the IDE can propose an automatic fix for it. We’ve added fixes for 17 rules, and the best part is that the user can choose to fix all issues of the same type all at once for the whole solution, which can immensely speed up paying down technical debt.

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A few weeks ago, I had a passionate debate with my old friend Nicolas Frankel about the usefulness of the code coverage metric. We started on Twitter and then Nicolas wrote a blog entry stating “Your code coverage metric is not meaningful” and so useless. Not only am I thinking exactly the opposite, but I would even say that not tracking the code coverage on new code is almost insane nowadays.

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This week I want to talk about SQALE – which is commonly pronounced “scale.”

Before I joined SonarSource, I tried many times to understand what SQALE was about, but I just couldn’t get a grip on it. Recently, I sat down with SonarSource Senior Consultant David Racodon, who walked me through it, and made it seem simple. Since version 4.0 brought the fundamentals of SQALE into SonarQube core for everyone to use, I think it’s important to share what I learned in case anyone else is puzzled too.

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Most IT people know Thoughtworks and its charismatic technical leader / evangelist Martin Fowler. But probably fewer know the Thoughtworks Technology Radar whose first publication was done in January 2010.

According to their authors :

The ThoughtWorks Technology Advisory Board is a group of senior technology leaders within ThoughtWorks. They produce the ThoughtWorks Technology Radar to help decision makers understand emerging technologies and trends that affect the market today. This group meets regularly to discuss the global technology strategy for ThoughtWorks and the technology trends that significantly impact our industry.

In its last publication (July 2011), Sonar platform made its first appearance in the “Assess” circle : “Worth exploring with the goal of understanding how it will affect your enterprise”

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A few weeks ago, Evgeny described how Sonar can be used with its JaCoCo plugin to measure code coverage by Integration Tests. By adding this new feature to Sonar, Evgeny has actually done more than closing the most voted issue in Jira at the time : he has made a first baby step towards closing some gaps that exist in the world of Software Quality.

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Six months ago, we would never have believed that one day we would be happy and excited to write about the implementation of a Quality Model in Sonar. Indeed the Quality Models that we knew at the time (most of them are based on ISO 9126 standard) are complex, expensive to implement, can be understood only by an elite of quality experts and are not fun at all. Displaying a global rating on an application is easy but insuring that this rating can be understood in less than 5 minutes by every stakeholder is much more difficult. Implementing one of those Quality Models in Sonar was a kind of non-sense, even if this feature was highly requested by big companies. Indeed they were in contradiction with the vision behind Sonar :

Managing the source code quality should be simple, should be cheap, should be accessible by all stakeholders (developer, architect, project manager, top manager, …), should be valuable and should be fun (without pleasure, perfection cannot be reached) !

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