I'm trying to run a preview analysis for a (Java) project of ours with SonarQube 5.1.1. I am able to get a local report generated, however I get no coverage data, and I also get the message [INFO] [XX:YY:ZZ.ZZZ] Build Breaker plugin is no more supported in preview/incremental mode.
If I check here, the page says that Starting with SonarQube 5.1, the Build Breaker plugin does not work any longer in the preview & incremental modes..
I'm confused - I thought that for continuous inspection one needs the build breaker plugin. Is that no longer so? Has the concept in SonarQube changed?
Why am I not getting coverage data when running a preview analysis?
I don't know where you've read this, but continuous inspection is not specifically related to the preview/incremental mode nor to the build breaker plugin - it's not even related to SonarQube (even though it has been pushed by SonarSource from the very beginning).
Here are the key points:
Continuous inspection is about analyzing your code as often as you can in order to monitor (and eventually improve) the quality of your code. Whatever the tool.
On SonarQube, this means running analyses that will push information on the server so that you can monitor what's going on and take the required actions for your application portfolio.
Obviously, when you are a developer, you'd like to manage those issues early, before they even get pushed to the source code repository. But experience tells us that preventing any code push because of issues is a bad pattern - because some issues might be false-positive or not relevant in the context (and still you want - and have the right, to push your code). This is why we feel that the build breaker plugin is not aligned with all this, and it will be replaced in upcoming versions of SQ by native features that match better these concepts:
Very efficient code analysis to display issues in the IDE at the speed of light - but without computing metrics
Preview mode that will compute everything and make it possible to check quality gate before pushing code to the source code repository - without impacting the results on the server
and in this case, using some specific information found in the logs, it will be possible for a CI to fail a build
Related
SonarQube Quality Profiles are not being used during the sonarqube scan:
We have sonar tasks installed and enabled for build definition what we are seeing is that the quality profiles are being stopped for one build run and it is again started using the quality profiles for the next run automatically. We are consistently seeing the same behavior for the alternate build runs.
Image where we can see the profiles are stopped and started:
What you're seeing is the result of a bad configuration somewhere. You indicate your comments that along with the toggling of profiles, you also see large swings in issue counts
as most of the file types get excluded from analysis resulting in very few issues reported.
So let's break this down:
The profile events you're seeing simply record/reflect the changes in profile use from one analysis to another. If I have a project with Java and JavaScript, the first analysis will use the default profiles for that language. Then, let's say I use the deprecated property sonar.language to restrict analysis to just Java files and analyze again. Since JavaScript is no longer found in my project, the default JavaScript profile will not be used, and a profile event will be recorded.
That seems to be what you're seeing in your activity log.
So now to the detective work: why is this happening? First, this swings back and forth. That indicates configurations set not at the project level (in SonarQube itself) but properties that are only sometimes passed during the analysis, or some other analysis-side circumstance. There are a few possible causes which you'll need to investigate independently:
sonar.language - if this deprecated property is used during analysis, it will limit the by-default multi-language analysis to a single language. It could be in your properties files or passed on the analysis command line -Dsonar.language=foo
exclusions - exclusions are difficult to set properly from the analysis side, but this can happen
improper/incomplete checkout - is it possible that only part of your project is checked out?
In investigating this, you should be aware that analysis-side properties can be set at two levels; at the individual project/analysis or in the global scanner configuration.
I'm guessing that your CI system has multiple slaves and languages are dropped - or not - from your project depending on which slave the job lands on that night.
I was experiencing a similar problem and I believe I have tracked down the root of the issue for us. Capturing the source code and properties used during the build, I was unable to find any discrepancies in sonar properties or source code collected, as suggested in the previous answer.
Our solution we were trying to analyze with SonarQube has a few C# projects that are part of an external core solution, which is shared between several components. Compiling any one of these other components requires that core be compiled first. I believe the issue lies in that when compiling my component to be analyzed, MsBuild would sometimes rebuild some of the projects included in core. Depending on if they were rebuilt or not, the number of projects and files (and hence issues) would swing wildly in one direction or the other.
By enforcing MsBuild to clean my component solution before compiling,
MsBuild.exe MySolution.sln /t:Clean,Build
I ensure a consistent set of projects are built and analyzed by sonarqube. I am 30 builds in with this new approach and I have no more flopping back and forth between using and not using a quality profile.
Sonar analysis is a nice way to check code compliance against a centrally defined policy. This is why I would like to use a profile with Blocker a Critical rules to signify a broken build.
I am using Jenkins do builds and invoke the SonarRunnerBuilder to get standard analysis on nightly builds of projects.
To achieve the features I outlined it would be best if I could run the analysis, check the results for violations (preferrably not sending them to Sonar server) and fail the build if there were any violations. So far I have not found way to do this using Google and looking through SonarRunner source code.
What I have considered is a workaround. I would implement a Decorator collecting violations and when the decoration reaches the project resource I would throw a RuntimeException to break the analysis. This would in turn fail the build.
would this work? Is there any better way to achieve this?
What you are looking for seems to be what the build breaker plugin offers. It relies on the Quality gate configuration to detect when violations (now called issues) in the current analysis require to break the whole build.
Please consider that this plugin won't be supported in SonarQube 5.2. Technically, deep changes in SonarQube's architecture make it impossible to provide the same feature. Philosophically, this plugin does not match the experience SonarQube wants to offer.
Still, another solution which covers the same use case is very likely to be offered in future version of SonarQube but this is yet to be defined.
I'm configuring a multi-module maven project that force the execution of sonar:sonar in the verify phase.
I also use the build-breaker-plugin of sonar to avoid deploying the module if some alerts are thrown by sonar.
The problem with this approach is that the developer should go to the sonar server to check the alerts. This is not that bad but if several users try to analyses the same module at the same time is impossible to know if the last/current analysis have your alerts.
CONTEXT: we have a CI system that builds all the modules each hour. So sometimes this collides with some developer deploy (that force the analysis)
IMHO, only the CI system should commit the analysis to the sonar server, because the CI have the lasted committed and deployed code. But the developer should only check locally his changes.
So, why we are forcing the analysis in the developer build? To avoid deploying modules that does not respect the code quality thresholds (The build-breaker plugin of sonar helps on this).
There is a way to configure the maven-sonar-plugin to do this?
local analysis in the developer build.
server analysis in the CI build
From what I understand, you should probably have a first instance of Sonar which is only used during the build to break it if your quality requirements are not met, and a second one that is used by your CI system and that is the reference for your products. And if you really want to enforce your process and be sure that code which breaks those requirements is not pushed into your SCM system, then you could bind a Sonar analysis on a pre-commit hook. But this seems a bit extreme to me...
At SonarSource, we haven't chosen the "block a commit because of violations" approach. Indeed, we consider that having some technical debt (= violations) is OK as long as you manage it. Managing technical debt means reviewing each incoming violation in Sonar and fixing them in the code or affecting those violations to action plans, the main idea being that the technical debt should not have increased at the end of a development sprint. This is what the review feature of Sonar is meant for. And Sonar provides widgets to monitor the evolution of reviews and new violations without a review.
I decided to use the following pattern after reading semantic versioning at http://semver.org/. However, I have some unsolved issues in my mind in terms of automaticng and integrating SDLC tools.
Version Pattern:
major.minor.revision.build
Such that;
Major: major changes, should be increamented manually.
Minor: minor changes, should be increamented automatically, whenever a new feature or an enhancement to existing feature is solved in issue tracking system.
Revision: changes not affecting the minor changes, should be increamented automatically, whenever a bug is solved in issue tracking system.
Assume that developers never commit the source unless an issue has been solved in issue tracking system, and the issue tracking system is JIRA in this configuration. This means that there are bugs, improvements, and new features as issue types by default, apart from the tasks.
Furthermore, I am adding a continous integration tool in this configuration, and assume that it is bamboo (by the way, I never used bamboo before, I used Hudson), and I am using Eclipse IDE with mylyn plugin and plus the project is a Maven project (web).
Now, I want to elucidate what I want to do by illustrating following scenario. Analyst (A) opens an issue (I), which is a new feature, related to Maven project (P). As a developer (D), I receive an email about the issue, and I open the task via Mylyn interface in Eclipse. I understand and develop the new feature related to issue (I). Consider, I am a Test Driven Development oriented developer, thus I wrote the Unit, DBUnit, and User-Acceptance (for example using Selenium) tests correspondingly. Finally, I commit the changes to the source control. I think the rest should be cycled automatically but I don't know how can I achieve this? The auto-cycled part is the following:
The Source Control System should have a post-hook script that triggers the Continous integration tool to build the project (P). While building, in the proper phase the test code should be run, and their reports generated. The user-acceptance test should be performed in a dedicated server (For example, jboss, or Tomcat). The order of this acceptance test should be, up the server, run the UA test, then generate the UA test reports and down the server. If all these steps have been successfuly completed, the versioning should be performed. In versioning part, the Maven plugin, or what so ever, should take the number of issues solved from the Issue Tracking System, and increment the related version fragments (minor and revision), at last appends the build number. The fragments of the version may be saved in manifest file in order to show it in User Interface. Last but not the least, the CI tool should deploy it in Test environment. That's all auto-cycled processes I want.
The deployment of the artifact to the production environment should be done automatically or manually?
Let's start with the side question: On the automatic deployment to production, this requires the sign off of "the business" whomever that is. How good do your tests need to be to automatically push to production? Are they good enough that you trust things to just go live? What's your downtime? Is that acceptable? If your tests miss something, can you rollback? Are you monitoring production so you know if you've introduced problems? Generally, the answers to enough of these questions is negative enough that you can't auto-deploy there as the result of a build / autotest event.
As for the tracking, you'll need a few things. You'll need all your assumptions to be true (which I doubt they are, but if you get there that's awesome). You'll also need a build number that can be incremented after build time based on test results. You'll need source changes to be annotated with bug ids. You'll need the build system to parse the source changes and make associations with issues. You'll need an API into the build system so you can get the count of issues associated with the build. Finally you'll need your own bit of scripting to do the query and update the build number accordingly.
That's totally doable, but is it really worth having? What's the value you attach to the numbering scheme?
Does Sonar offer any way to raise alerts and fail a build when the trend for certain metrics is bad?
Background: In our legacy project using a static threshold for example for code coverage ("red alert when coverage is below 80%") does not make much sense. But we would like to make sure that the coverage does not go down any further.
Please do not give any advice on lowering the bar by using a less restrictive rule set. This is no option in our case.
There is a build breaker plug-in that will fail the build if you breach a Warning or Error threshold setup in the quality profile.
Plug-in details are here:
http://docs.sonarqube.org/display/PLUG/Build+Breaker+Plugin
Not aware of any functionality that enables you to a metric trend.
We use Sonar as the second last step in our release process. The build breaker ensures that releases do not breach predetermined quality criteria.
We tried exactly the same, using the build breaker plugin. After a while, it showed to be too unflexible (and configuring Sonar is a mess), so we moved from sonar to Jenkins/Hudson plugins like Cobertura (for code coverage) or PMD for code style:
https://wiki.jenkins-ci.org/display/JENKINS/PMD+Plugin
https://wiki.jenkins-ci.org/display/JENKINS/Cobertura+Plugin
With these plugins, very fine-granular settings are possible, to set for example the build to yellow at <70% code coverage or to red by <50%; even the weather-symbol for each build is setable.
In the meanwhile we scripted our own buildbreaker that gets excecuted within our build. We use Groovy to query the REST API of Sonar to retrieve a certain set of metrics (including their historical values). The retrieval of metrics is provided by a build plugin that is provided for our whole division.
Each team can parameterize their build with a set of rules regarding those metrics that have to be verified for their project. Of course, the rules are also provides as Groovy snippets :-)
Typical are:
Number of (major|critical|blocker) violations is less or equal than in previous build
No new duplicates
Coverage not lower than in previous build
Bad findings can then be used for breaking the build or just for reporting.