I recently wrote a post listing what was accomplished in the SonarQube platform last year. Today, I’ll continue with even more exciting stuff: what we’ll do this year! I’ll share: what the main innovations will be, how the ecosystem will evolve, and what technical challenges we’ll face.

I’ll start with the highest voted request in the SonarQube Jira, which is only six months younger than SonarSource itself:

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A new year provides a good opportunity to look back at what was achieved the previous year. I’ll do that for the SonarQube platform in this post.

Let’s start with a summary of this retrospective. Last year:

• the platform was renamed into SonarQube
• 5 releases of SonarQube platform
• 130 releases of ecosystem products
• 75,000+ downloads of SonarQube
• 13,000+ messages on mailing lists

So I suppose we can call this a pretty active year for the community. Now, the longer version:

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The Sonar project was launched more than 6 years ago, and SonarSource, the company that develops and promotes Sonar, was set up almost 5 years ago. Since then, we at SonarSource have consistently focused on developing the platform, really staying in our role of Software vendor. Except for cases where we could bring a unique expertise, we have avoided providing consulting services for several reasons:

• We want to focus all our energy on improving the platform, and consulting would be very disruptive.
• We want to avoid the “easy” money to stay focused on the core of the business: the software.

Those reasons are good enough for not going into the consulting business, but there is another one that dwarfs them all in my opinion: there is a huge market out there for companies that want to run a business around code quality. And when there is a big market, it generally does not take long before numerous companies respond to market demands with rich offerings. We could certainly compete in such a marketplace, but it’s not what we do best. Therefore it’s clear to us: we should focus on developing the tool, and consultancy companies will execute on implementation services. This was our vision 5 years ago, and it has not changed!

I am amazed every day to see how many companies are considering Sonar as the next tool they will adopt massively. Amongst them are the biggest companies in the world. As an example, we know that at least 30 of the Fortune 100 companies (and we’re sure there are more) are using Sonar intensively across their organizations. Those guys need professional services to succeed in their implementations: they obviously need support for installation and configuration of the tool, but what they need first and foremost is help defining strategies and implementing processes around code quality. For example, they need help to:

• Define quality requirements and map them into a Sonar quality gate
• Define and implement the reporting necessary to execute on the strategy
• Define actions plan for remediation of existing issues
• Define a process to enforce actions plan
• …

Companies need professional services to succeed with Sonar – services we cannot offer, but would like to support. To that end, we have developed a SonarSource partnership program that provides partner support for the pre-sales process, complete access to our entire solution, discounts on our Editions, and some visibility on our web site.

For those who aren’t ready to come on board with this partnership program yet, of course you’re still welcome to do business around Sonar and use the user mailing list to share experience and provide feedback. But we hope you’ll join us in this partnership, to the betterment of your ventures and the Sonar community at large.

This is it! After talking about it, internally at SonarSource, for 2 years and after a failed attempt last year, we are discontinuing the support of Java 5 runtime for the Sonar platform. Here are a few questions you might have on this:

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After an initial attempt that ended up posting on what was accomplished last year, time has now come to discuss the plans for Sonar in 2011 and the associated roadmap !

In 2010, Sonar has progressively become a “must have in software factories” as are already Jenkins, Jira, Nexus or Subversion for instance. With Sonar, a quality platform can now be considered as a commodity which can be installed and used by everybody with only little investment whether it is time or money. We will still focus our effort in 2011 to increase the value of the platform and make teams capable of continuously assessing and reimbursing their technical debt even easily than today.

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This is sometimes a bit frustrating, when you are contributing to an Open Source project, to have doubts about who your users are… really. Not knowing them might lead to not understand their needs and therefore not being close enough to deliver value.

Despite the fact that we are always ready to answer questions on the mailing lists, the Sonar team wanted to be sure it knows well enough its users and their experience using the platform. That is why we recently made two polls and today I would like to share their results :

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Codehaus has been officially accepted into Google Summer of Code 2010. Based on the great job done by Ben Walding previous years, we expect that several projects get funded at The Haus this year.
Ben has open a page for Codehaus projects to propose ideas they wish student could pick and develop. We have proposed 3 ideas that we think are interesting challenges for students and a great addition to the Sonar platform :

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SonarSource, founded more than a year ago, is a Swiss company that leads the development of the Sonar platform. Obviously Sonar and SonarSource are really tight together : Sonar would not be where it is today without SonarSource, but the other way around is also true. Like any company making business around an Open Source product, we often get the question on what Open Source means for us and what is our real commitment towards it.

The short answer to this is a single word : LGPL. The is the license we chose from inception of the project instead of an ordinary GPL license. Why ? Because we believe that to make Sonar an extensible platform rather than just a tool, we need a license that fits both Open Source community and Commercial companies needs. To make sure people are going to invest in a platform, it should belong to its active users. With this choice and to keep its leadership on the platform, SonarSource has therefore committed to continuously invest in Sonar.

The longer answer refers to the idea of an Open Core by Jason Van Zyl. Jason describes what are his four principles and we fully adhere to them :

• The Open Source product you provide to users must be great: the Open Core should stand on its own as something truly useful without any additional commercial add-ons. The software must perform well in a production environment.
  
  This is so true that many Sonar users don’t even know the existence of SonarSource




• The Open Source product you provide should go through an ungodly amount of testing and QA. Testing and QA on the Open Core are the cornerstone of quality and should not be reserved for commercial versions of your product.
  
  The Sonar core is covered by about 1’300 unit tests and 150 integration tests (most of them are selenium tests) which are executed by two continuous integration server. Of course we run Sonar on Sonar on a daily basis and we do performance profiling before every release. SonarSource’s plugins are extensions of Sonar, not a kind of professional packaging : they fully depends on the quality of the core.




• The Open Source product you provide should be architected such that all commercial features are plug-ins to the Open Core.
  
  The Views, Master project, PL/SQL and Identify plugin are fully based on Sonar extension points and nothing more.




• The Open Source product you sell should have completely open pricing. If someone cannot clearly see what your pricing is and what the difference is between your open and commercial versions, you likely have a predatory and opportunistic pricing model
  
  I believe it is the case.

With the the adoption of LGPL and the respect of those four principles, you can definitely Come in, we’re open !.

You already know Sonar as an enterprise tool to analyze and manage code quality of a projects portfolio. We claim, for very good reasons obviously :-), that it is easy to install and easy to use. Currently, it covers Java and PL/SQL languages.

As a tool, Sonar is more and more often compared to commercial products such as Cast Software or Metrixware for instance. Having said that, if I had the choice, I’d prefer Sonar to be compared to Kalistik (commercial product) that better fits the market evolution and needs.

All this is great, but as you might have realized already, Sonar is more than a simple out-of-the-box product : it is an open source (LGPL) platform to manage code quality, i.e. the foundations on which the community has already started to build new floors. Our aim is that Sonar becomes to quality management what TCP is today to network applications : the central component to go further and faster. That’s our new dream since the command “mvn sonar:sonar” is available :-).

Here are real life examples that support the idea of Sonar being a platform:

• Let’s say you have built a commercial tool (PC-Lint, Simian, SAP ABAP Code Inspector … ) or an open source one (Testability Explorer, Crap4j, Clang Static Analyzer…) or let’s say that you think a new axis of quality analysis would be more pertinent. By developing a plugin in Sonar, you kill two birds with one stone : you immediately have access to a large community of users and you benefit from the built-in functionality (TimeMachine, trends, consolidation…)
• You manage a consulting company and are building a package around quality. By building this package around Sonar, your client gets basically the tool for free and what they are going to pay for is what you have to sell : your expertise on quality

I believe that code quality management is going to become a commodity in the medium term as is continuous integration today; and I do hope that Sonar is going to play a central role in this democratization move.