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Features

This product is a full implementation of the SQALE (Software Quality Assessment based on Lifecycle Expectations) methodology developed by Inspearit (formerly DNV ITGS). This method contains both a Quality Model and an Analysis Model. The SQALE Quality Model conforms to ISO/IEC 9126 with its underlying structured set of characteristics and sub-characteristics. SQALE allows to :

• Rate the quality of an application from configurable source code requirements
• Provide quantitative diagnosis for software types and suppliers
• Organize the findings and clearly prioritize the remediation action plan

The use and the configuration of this product requires to have a deep understanding of the SQALE method freely available and licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported license.

The SQALE product can be combined with the Views Product to :

• Offer full management of a portfolio of projects
• Provide estimation of the technical debt of departments/teams/project…
• Rate all the organization units

SQALE Widgets

Once the SQALE product is installed, 8 new Sonar widgets are available and can be inserted into any project dashboard.

SQALE Overview

This first widget simply displays high level measures to get a quick overview : the SQALE Rating, the SQALE Remediation Cost and the number of Lines of Code :

SQALE Time Machine

Displays the SQALE remediation cost evolution over time.

SQALE Pyramid

SQALE Sunburst

Breaks down the SQALE remediation cost by characteristics, sub-characteristics and and finally by requirements :

By default only the characteristic level is displayed, to change this behavior the widget must be edited :

SQALE Remediation costs to reduce risk

This widget allows to determine the effort required to decrease the risk on a project.

Files with highest SQALE remediation costs

This widget displays a hotspot of files with the highest remediation cost. It’s also possible to define a filter on a characteristic.

SQALE File Distribution by Rating

SQALE Kiviat

SQALE Rules

The SQALE product embeds its own rules engine to provide new valuable source code requirements :

• Insufficient branch coverage by unit tests : a violation is created on a file as soon as the line coverage on this file is less than the required configurable threshold. The remediation cost of the violation depends on the lines to be covered in order to reach the required threshold.
• Insufficient line coverage by unit tests : A violation is created on a file as soon as the line coverage on this file is less than the required configurable threshold. The remediation cost of the violation depends on the lines to be covered in order to reach the required threshold.
• Duplicated blocks : A violation is created on a file as soon as there is a block of duplicated code on this file: The remediation cost of the violation depends on the number of blocks in the file.
• Insufficient comment density : a violation is created on a file as soon as the comment line density on this file is less than the required configurable threshold. The remediation cost of the violation depends on the comment lines to be added in order to reach the required threshold.

Drilldown Pages

From there, you have the ability to drilldown to display the breakdown of this cost by resource. A simple click on SQALE measures or in the sunburst will display the corresponding drilldown :

SQALE Measures and the Filters Pages

Like any other measures, the SQALE rating and the SQALE remediation cost can be used in the Filters service. You can for instance display in the Sonar homepage all projects whose SQALE rating is less than C :

Known limitations

The SQALE product does not render properly with certain revision of IE6. It is therefore recommended to use a greater version of IE or an other browser to use SQALE.

Next: Configuration