i am a Beginner with SonarQube and really tried to google and read a lot of community pages to understand which functions SonarQube offers.
What i dont get is: What does the test coverage in SonarQube refer to?
If it says for example that the coverage on New Code is 30% what does new code mean?
And when does SonarQube say that a issue is a bug? Is the analyzed code compared to a certain standard in order for SonarQube to say that there is a bug?
I hope someone with more knowledge about SonarQube can help me understand it. Thank you very much
Test coverage (also known as code coverage) corresponds to the proportion of the application code (i.e., code without test and sample code) that is executed by test cases out of all application code of the code base.
SonarQube does not compute code coverage itself. Instead coverage is computed and uploaded by external code coverage tools (e.g., cobertura, JaCoCo). SonarQube presents code coverage at different levels (e.g., line coverage, condition coverage); see https://docs.sonarqube.org/latest/user-guide/metric-definitions/#header-9.
Coverage on new code refers to the proportion of code that is both covered and added (or modified) since a certain baseline out of all added and changed code since the same baseline. The baseline can, for example, be the previously analyzed code state or the code state of the previous commit. That is, this metric expresses how extensively changes have been tested. Note that 100% coverage does not mean that code has been perfectly tested; it just says that all code has been executed by test cases.
Issues in SonarQube do not necessarily represent bugs. Usually most issues are actually not bugs but are problems affecting code maintainability in the long term (e.g., code duplications) or violations of best practices. Still, some issues can represent bugs (e.g., potential null-dereferences, incorrect concurrency handling).
Note that an issue can also be false a positive and therefore not be a problem at all.
Most issues are identified with static code analysis by searching the code structure for certain patterns. Some can be uncovered by simple code searches (e.g., violation of naming conventions). Other analyses / issue classes may additionally need data-flow analyses (null-dereferences) or require byte-code information.
Related
New to sonarqube quality gates. Asking for some help -
Is there way to have a quality gate fail based on, and I'll use the business term, 'unsupported language' - which may be defined as anything that doesn't have a sonarqube scanner....or more specifically defined by a business stance of no more language 'XYZ'.
Applied:
Is there a way to fail quality gate, at least at a high level, by detecting the existence of, say for example, files by extension (i.e. .groovy for groovy files, .c/.h for C++ files for example, .bsh for beanshell scripts for example), and then to provide a simple 'linecount' showing how many files and how many lines are in the files that are 'out of compliance'?
p.s. linecount is show 'scope', so if filesize is easier, that would work at a high level, although linecount is easier to reason/guesstimate with.
p.p.s Additional reasoning/complication - 'code coverage' metrics are only based on recognized scans, so a project showing '95% code coverage' for only 2 java files, but the other 40 groovy files, for example, are not included in the metric. This example will help apply more understanding as to why looking for ways to address this (other than adding an unsupported groovy sonar plugin, which I see/know about, but is not the root problem).
Thanks for any creative/quick-to-apply options!
-Darren
SonarQube 7.3 it has inbuilt support for golang where I have found at least 2 issues :-
It does not exclude *_test.go automatically from coverage. In unit tests it also picks up IP addresses and asks them to be made configurable (not constant which also does not fix the error).
It counts structs and const as not covered lines and hence has a significantly lower % covered than the go coverage tool itself making it a bad use case. For example in a medium size project it reports 40% coverage against go tools 70%
Apart from commenting them all to be sonar exclude or putting constants and structs in a common exclude pattern file is there something else that can be done? Is there a plan to address these in a later version of SonarQube?
For now (SonarQube 7.4), SonarGo analyzer does not identify automatically *_test.go as test files. This is a missing feature, this is why the SonarGo documentation describes how to properly identify test files through settings:
sonar.test.inclusions=**/*_test.go
Without proper test identification, the coverage result will be wrong and the analysis result could raise issues that do not make sense (like hard-coded IP addresses in tests).
About the coverage accuracy (for files that are not test files), there's two cases:
If a file has entries related to it in the coverage report, the covered lines shown in SonarQube should match exactly the ones in the report, otherwise it's a major bug. But the percentage shown by go tools (ranges coverage) could be slightly different that the percentage shown in SonarQube (lines coverage), e.g: +2%.
If a file is not in the coverage report, SonarGo generate a 0% coverage based on its definition of executable line of code. If there's a difference with go test definition of executable line of code, it's a bug that will disappear once the file is partially covered.
The best way to have those coverage bugs fixed, is to report them at community.sonarsource.com by creating a Report a Bug topic with a small code reproducer.
I use sonarqube to do the line coverage analysis, but the reporting results are fallacious.
For example for the if method below:
if(a != null ){
system.out.print("Hello");
}
the if condition is reported as NOT covered by unit test，which means not executed .
BUT，the logical system.out.print("Hello") inside is reported as covered by unit test. that is illogical, right?
This is not really a question of SonarQube but of your coverage engine. SonarQube only relays what your coverage engine reported.
That said, you're likely misinterpreting the markers in the SonarQube interface, although without a screenshot it's hard to know for certain. If you're seeing a diagonally striped marker next to the if, then SonarQube is telling you that the line is partially covered. That is, there are multiple paths through the code and only some of them are taken in your testing. Specifically, it sounds like you are testing the path where the condition is true. I would guess you're not testing the path where the condition is false.
In a quality gate, we are able to specify values for 'Mutations Coverage', that specify when a warning or error is generated. Is there a way to display the mutations coverage value.
For example in the Measures -> Coverage tab?
This is where It coverage and the number of unit tests are displayed.
Any suggestions would be most welcome
All non-hidden measures (there are some metrics that are hidden either because they're deprecated or because they're calculated solely to feed other metrics) are displayed automatically in the Measures space.
If you have a plugin that's creating Mutations Coverage metrics, those values should already be available. But such measures are not created by default.
Tangential but relevant: SonarQube 6.2 consolidated coverage metrics into simply Coverage. Now you can feed as many coverage reports as you want, assuming the language plugin has been upgraded to support that, but the values are consolidated under the theory that by and large people don't care how the code is covered, only that it is.
Is there any way to include the test coverage of Cucumber features and other useful statistics in the SonarQube analysis? I have done a bit of researching, but couldn't find a proper plugin.
From this thread (written after the OP's question), David Racadon added:
As far as I understand:
It is not possible to run an analysis on a project containing only test code because the 'sonar.sources' property is mandatory.
Measures on test code are not aggregated at project level.
As far as I am concerned, I consider test files part of the project the same way source files are. Thus, measures of test files should be aggregated on top of source files.
For now, SonarQube shows that your project is 1,000 lines even if you have 0 or 10,000 lines of test code on top of those 1,000 lines of source code. For me, SonarQube gives you a biased estimate of the size of your project and the effort of maintenance.
The closest would then be his plugin racodond/sonar-gherkin-plugin which:
analyzes Cucumber Gherkin feature files and:
Computes metrics: lines of code, number of scenarios, etc.
Checks various guidelines to find out potential bugs and code smells through more than 40 checks
Provides the ability to write your own checks