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In this document, we briefly provide an overview of capabilities and functions provided by SonarQube, that could be used by code reviewers (subject-matter experts, SMEs) in performing the reviews requested by software development teams.
Introduction
SQ analyzes the software projects with respect to five main quality characteristics and their corresponding flaws:
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Each type of the flaw is reported separately and can be analyzed in a different way.
Navigating in SQ
Overview screen
After selecting a project, SQ presents a screen with an Overview screen, which provides the core data for each characteristic. These are:
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On the right-hand side, SQ presents the log of its analysis and a small diagram showing all relevant trends in all analyzed versions of the subject project.
Issues screen
More detailed information is provided by the Issues screen. It presents the list of all issues discovered by SQ, either in the past or currently. On the left-hand side, there are various filters that help in managing the scope of presented issues. Filtering options include the type of issue, its severity, resolution, current status and other information. Please note that the filters are cumulative, i.e., they produce a conjunction of all imposed filters.
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This is the basic mechanism for supporting the collaboration of reviewers with SQ. Reviewers are expected to cross-validate the findings reported by SQ by considering the context of the issue.
Measures screen
The Measures screen reports more in-depth data for each quality characteristic and code property (including also size and complexity). This screen provides low-level data and arguments for the issues reported in the Issues screen.
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In addition, SQ for each quality characteristic reports also its rating, calculated based according to the SQ schema (from A to E, with A being the highest / "best" score) and estimated remediation effort, showing the time required to adequately address and fix the issue. A detailed description of the ratings are described in the Rating Table.
Code screen
The Code screen acts as a formatted preview of the recent code snapshot analyzed by SQ, grouped by the packages. The screen provides also line numbers, the commits that recently changed a given line (including the author, data and commit id). Next, it indicates lines covered by unit tests (in green) and not covered (in red).
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The top-right corner provides also a condensed information about the file size, number of issues linked to currently open file and the test coverage metric (showing how completely the unit tests exercise the code in this file).
Activity screen
The Activity screen shows trend diagrams for selected metrics. Trends show how the subject metric(s) changed during subsequent SQ analyses. The data to be presented in the diagram can be customized by selecting the time period and the type of metric.
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