Sonar is an open source platform to manage code quality. It enables to collect, analyze and report metrics on source code. At eXo Platform, we use Sonar to manage and monitor the quality of our codebase. As Arnaud Heritier (our Software Development Manager) pointed out:
The inherent challenge to developing software is maintaining and improving the quality of the code as you add features and expand the codebase over time.
To manage our code quality, we rely on Sonar. Sonar provides us views ranging from a high level global dashboard down to the most granular detail about individual lines of code – from these we can extract quality indicators from our code development.
GateIn, the new portal that eXo is co-developing with JBoss, provides a dashboard where you can install gadget and customize them. So we wrote gadgets that you can add to your dashboard and customize to your needs. As Gadget is a standard, it’s also working in Jira. Arnaud explain more about this:
Managing a product isn’t only about focusing on quality. We also have to deliver on time, meet our subscription customers’ requirements, and incorporate as many community feature requests as possible. To keep an eye on everything, we wanted to leverage the flexible interface of the GateIn portal framework. By integrating Sonar’s gadgets, we’ll be able to quickly create our own set of customized dashboards to track all the metrics we need, like the activity of our teams, development roadblocks, tasks and issues on products, and a lot more. We’re even able to reuse Jira Gadgets in GateIn – it saves us a lot of time and is definitely more effective.
Sonar Gadget in GateIn Dashboard:
Sonar Gadget in Jira4:
If you want to try these gadgets in your own development environment, you can grab them from Google App Gallery. They can work in any standard OpenSocial/gadget container, and they’ve been tested with GateIn and Jira.
If you want to look under the hood, go to the Sonar gadget repository on github or download them. You can also easily add your own metrics to the gadgets.
Links:
- More technical details about the implementation/li>
- Sonar
- eXo and GateIn Sonar instance
- Source code of the Sonar gadgets
