Continuous Inspection

SonarSource products are built to support a holistic, fully-realized vision of a Continuous Inspection process, raising code quality visibility for all stakeholders and making it an integral part of the software development lifeycle.

Dimensions of Continuous Inspection

1. Analyze Code, Report and Take Actions

Dashboards that report on metrics
Rule-Based defect identification
Drilldowns, hotspots and other hunting services

2. Spot Trends with Continuous Time Series Reporting

Build process integration
Time machine to "replay the past"
Quality evolution and trending reports

3. Identify Defects on Latest Changes with Differential Views

Comparison with various versions of software
Quickly identify addition of new technical debt
Monitor coverage on new code

4. Focus Individually with Customized Reports per User

Each user can create fully customizable dashboards and filters
Mix various sources of information at varying granularity
Derive individual actions plans from custom reports

5. Take Control over New Issues

Manual review workflow to process and resolve violations
Support for violation comments, developer assignment and action plan association
Fully integrated with Eclipse IDE

Benefits

These features enable full support of a Continuous Inspection process and produce three immediate benefits:

They encourage developer adoption by enabling developers to quickly identify code improvements and quick wins.
They improve quality of code produced by increasing developer knowledge and understanding of code quality issues.
They reduce maintenance cost through early identification of quality issues.

Beyond Punctual Audits

The traditional approach to quality control has been to apply it after the development process completes. This approach is very limited as uncovering defects at a late stage can produce long delays while the defects are corrected, or result in the shipment of a low-quality product. To avoid this problem, SonarSource products provide support for the Continuous Inspection paradigm by enabling real-time notifications when code quality defects are introduced in an application. This transparency ensures that internal quality assurance is an integral part of the software development lifecycle, rather than an afterthought.

Standards-Driven Software Quality Workbench

For more effective code governance, a number of plugins are available to enhance Sonar with additional quality metrics. For example, these include support for the Software Quality Assessment based on Lifecycle Expectations (SQALE) methodology. With these tools at hand, quality managers and technical architects have a complete workbench to rate application quality, perform quantitative analysis and define corrective action.