Using Sonargraph to analyse a large code base usually reveals a lot of issues. The “System Diff” helps to keep the quality level by highlighting new and worsened issues as described in a previous blog post. But up to now there has been no recommendation about which of the already existing issues should be fixed first.
The new “Ranking” view available in Sonargraph 11.5 does exactly that and this blog post describes how it works.
Motivation for Code Quality
The main idea behind Sonargraph has always been to provide a tool that eases the creation and maintenance of high-quality software. For any serious project that must live longer than a couple of months, it is actually cheaper to spend a part of your resources to keep your software constantly at a good level of quality than using all your time to create new features. Martin Fowler explains this very well in his article “Is High Quality Worth the Cost?”. The bottom line is, that apart from the very early development stages, high-quality software is actually cheaper to develop, because it allows adding new features at almost constant speed, whereas it becomes more and more time consuming to add new features into a code base with low quality. According to our experience the most successful teams spend about 15% to 20% of their time on code hygiene.
We at hello2morrow believe that a consistent architecture is a fundamental part of software quality. When we use the term “architecture”, we think of it in terms of the IEEE 1471 standard:
“The fundamental organization of a system embodied in its components, their relationships to each other, and to the environment, and the principles guiding its design and evolution.”
This blog post describes why architectural design as an activity is needed, why conformance checks need to be done automatically by a tool and how Sonargraph supports you as a developer and architect during these activities.
Read MoreEfficiently Track the Quality of a Code Base
Sonargraph offers a wide range of checks for different aspects of software quality: Architecture, metric thresholds, cyclic dependencies, duplicate code, etc.
When Sonargraph gets introduced for software projects that have been developed a couple of years, chances are high that hundred’s of issues are reported. But getting flooded with issues and sifting through them at regular intervals is neither efficient nor really helpful. Instead, you want to get a quick overview whether or not the quality is going into the right direction.
And this is where quality gates come into the game: they allow focussing on the information important to you.
This blog post details how this functionality is implemented in Sonargraph.
Read MoreVisualizing an Architecture Aspect as a UML Component Diagram
Sonargraph’s domain specific language (DSL) to describe architecture aspects is very powerful. An architecture aspect consists at least of 1 top-level architecture file that has been added to the architecture configuration and is checked automatically. Such a top-level architecture file can include other architecture files reusing common definitions. With our latest release (11.4.0) we complemented the strictly text based representation of architecture aspects with a UML component generator.
A generated UML component diagram complements in several ways our text based architecture aspects:
- It is a commonly accepted form of communicating architecture definitions
- It shows the resulting architecture aspect event if it is spread over several files in 1 diagram
- It can be used to cross-check the underlying text based architecture aspect (i.e. are the resulting restrictions the intended ones?)
Analyzing Software with Advanced Visualizations
I thought I’d use our new 3D city view visualizations to have a closer look at Apache-Cassandra, a very popular and successful open source project that implements a NoSql database. I know from previous analysis runs of the same software that it already had problems with structural erosion. Years ago I analyzed Cassandra 1.2.6 and found pretty big cycle groups for Java files as well as for packages. Maintainability Level was only 9.4% (everything under 50% is concerning) while the metric “Propagation Cost” has a value of 62%. That means that every change will affect 62% of all code directly or indirectly which also is not a good thing because it significantly increases the chance of regression bugs.
Before you say “this image is useless, you cannot see anything there” let me tell you that I agree. The point is to make sure that your software never ends up in that situation. This big cyclic conglomeration is making it close to impossible to modularize Cassandra or to put any kind of architectural model on top of it.
Read MoreDesign Architecture Improvements using Sonargraph’s Architectural View
In the last couple of months we added support for the interactive modeling of architectural aspects in Sonargraph. Whilst our architecture DSL is tremendously powerful, there are situations where the new interactive modeling via the Architectural view is more appealing.
The Architectural view is is ideal for exploring architecture, designing architectural aspects and simulation of code refactorings on existing (even unfamiliar) code bases. Its power is derived from the unique combination of code exploration, architecture definition, simulation of code refactorings and visual feedback of architectural issues in real time.
For this blog post I chose FreeMind as example project, a freely available software written in Java offering a user interface based on Swing/AWT. The hypothetical task at hand is to see what needs to be done to implement another user interface based on let’s say SWT. The author of that popular free mind-mapping software probably never envisioned this requirement, but we have all seen frameworks come and go, so this is not a far-fetched requirement and is obviously not limited to SWT. I picked the software solely as an example to demonstrate how Sonargraph’s Architectural view helps to prepare the existing code base for such a task.
Read MoreUsing Sonargraph’s “System Diff” for Continuous Code Quality Improvements
Sonargraph often discovers a huge number of issues for large software projects. This is especially the case for projects that do not use static code analysis tools and that have many contributors. The analysis results can be overwhelming because it is not obvious where to start with quality improvements.
A common best practice to improve code quality is “to keep a lid on it” by preventing further issues to be introduced in new code and gradually improving existing code where it needs to be changed. This is described by Robert Martin as the boyscout rule: “Always leave the campground cleaner than you found it.” [KH]
This blog post explains how Sonargraph’s “System Diff” feature helps to focus on recently introduced issues that need the developer’s attention.
Read MoreGolden Rules for Sonargraph Newbies
This article will explain how to maximize the benefits of using Sonargraph in day to day development operations. One major benefit is to stop and reverse architectural decay, but Sonargraph can also help to limit complexity and find actual problems in the code.
Read MoreImplementing Additional Metrics Using the Sonargraph Script API
With the Sonargraph 9.10 release, we added support for two additional OO-metrics “Depth of Inheritance” and “Number of Children” as described by Chidamber and Kemerer. Sonargraph provides a powerful Script API that allows implementing new metrics as Groovy scripts and I needed surprisingly little amount of code for the implementation. This blog post will explain the scripts’ code and the used Sonargraph Script API in detail.
Read MoreA Promising New Metric To Track Maintainability
A good metric to measure software maintainability is the holy grail of software metrics. What we would like to achieve with such a metric is that its values more or less conform with the developers own judgement of the maintainability of their software system. If that would succeed we could track that metric in our nightly builds and use it like the canary in the coal mine. If values deteriorate it is time for a refactoring. We could also use it to compare the health of all the software systems within an organization. And it could help to make decisions about whether it is cheaper to rewrite a piece of software from scratch instead of trying to refactor it.
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