Tag: sonargraph

Setting up Sonargraph on your Project

Alexander von Zitzewitz Leave a comment

Over the years we implemented many different methods to set up Sonargraph for your project. Some of them are now quite outdated and are only kept in the tool for compatibility reasons. This article is meant to help you with your initial setup and chose the most effective method for your particular circumstances. There is one section for each language supported by Sonargraph.

General Recommendations

Sonargraph maintains a folder for each software system, that contains a description of your project, the locations of source folders (and class folders for Java), your architecture model and all other parts of a Sonargraph quality model. We call this folder the Sonargraph system folder. It only contains text files (mostly XML) and should ideally be placed in the root directory of your VCS (version control system) repository. You also should add this folder to your VCS, since the Sonargraph model will evolve together with your software system. This will allow you to share one Sonargraph model with all the developers working on your project.

Each Sonargraph software system contains at least one module. Modules usually correspond to the modules or sub-projects in your IDE.

How to initially create this folder for your project is the subject of this article. The folder should have the name of your software system and always ends with ‘.sonargraph’.

Read More

Recently Added Usability Improvements

Ingmar Kellner Leave a comment

During the last months we released a couple of major features in Sonargraph that allowed easier interaction like the ‘Architectural View’ and improved the interpretation of results like the ‘System Diff’, ‘Quality Gates’ or ‘Issue Ranking’.  We have described the power of these features in individual blog posts.

Some implemented improvements are less obvious, but nevertheless can have a big impact while working with Sonargraph.

This blog post highlights four hidden gems that the casual Sonargraph user might not know about:

  1. Improved issue to resolution matching
  2. Filtering in tables
  3. Visualizing cycle croups in Exploration view
  4. Passing selection between Sonargraph and Eclipse IDE
Read More

Implementing Additional Metrics Using the Sonargraph Script API

Ingmar Kellner Leave a comment

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 More

Automatic Detection of Singletons

Ingmar Kellner Leave a comment

Today, we released a new version of Sonargraph with an improved script to find Singletons. “Singleton” is one of the design patterns described by the “Gang of Four” [1]. It represents an object that should only exist once.
There are a couple of pros and cons for a Singleton that I won’t go into detail in this blog post. For anyone interested, I recommend “Item 3: Enforce a singleton property with a private constructor or an enum type” in “Effective Java”, written by Joshua Bloch [2]. Two interesting links that came up during a quick internet research are listed as references [3] [4]. Let’s just summarize that it is important to ensure that Singletons are properly implemented to avoid bad surprises (a.k.a bugs) in your software. And you should keep an eye on the existing Singletons and check that they are not misused as global variables.

This blog post describes, how you can detect Singletons by utilizing the Groovy scripting functionality of Sonargraph.
Read More

Automate Cross-Project Analysis

Ingmar Kellner Leave a comment

Sonargraph is our tool to quickly assess the quality of a project. I get frequently asked, how Sonargraph supports the Enterprise Architect who needs to answer quality-related questions in the broader context across several projects.
Since we recently released new functionality that allows the automation of re-occurring quality checks, it is now the right time to write a blog post.
Example questions that an enterprise architect wants to answer:

  1. How frequently does a certain anti-pattern occur?
  2. How strong is the dependency on deprecated functionality?
  3. How many of my projects suffer from high coupling?

This article will demonstrate the following core functionality of Sonargraph to answer the above questions for a couple of projects and how to automate this analysis.

  1. Use a script to detect an anti-pattern (“Supertype uses Subtype”)
  2. Create a simple reference architecture to detect usage of sun.misc.Unsafe
  3. Add a threshold for a coupling metric (NCCD)
  4. Export a quality model
  5. Use Sonargraph Build Maven integration to execute the analysis.
  6. Create a small Java project to execute the Sonargraph Maven goal, access the data in the generated XML reports and create a summary.

Read More