I thought the previous post on the quality assessment of an application would be the last of our series on the analysis of Cobol code with Sonar. But I discovered this week a new plugin from eXcentia, very useful as a part of an assessment: the Sonar Benchmark Plugin.

This plugin allows a comparative evaluation – a benchmark – of an application over the entire code in your Sonar repository.

You remember that I have analyzed different Cobol applications, with whom I have created a Sonar View. With this View, we realized an evaluation of the quality of an application, not the most voluminous, but which had a significant number of violations.

For this, we put forward different numbers in order to make our assessment and propose some recommendations. But how does compare the quality of this application over the rest of our porfolio?

This is what we will verify with this Sonar Benchmark plugin. Continue reading →

A rule is known or it is not. A ‘best practice’ is applied or is not. But if it is not applied, is it because it is not applicable?

You must present the results of your initial Cobol analysis and of course, you want them to be as most relevant as possible in order to prove their value to the project teams, providers, stakeholders, etc.

This requires defining a Quality model – a set of rules and levels of severity – that allows the rapid identification of the most costly and dangerous ‘bad practices’. Obviously that would be a failure if you point at a violation to a ‘best practice’ which is not one – as for example, the use of SQL code (see our last post).

What are the rules you can use or not? What critical thresholds should you choose? How to adjust the Quality model in a Sonar Quality profile for your Cobol applications?

We will show in this post how to set up your own Quality model, using a Sonar View and a very useful widget. Continue reading →

We have seen in our previous post how to analyze Cobol code with Sonar and Jenkins.

But in fact we have not used all the existing Cobol rules. Why? Some rules are disabled because they are specific to a particular context and then require some setup. For example, naming rules are not standardized in Cobol, and will often be different between different departments or even between teams from the same department.

So we need to manage different Quality models corresponding to different set of rules, depending on the project. Sonar gives us that opportunity, thanks to the ‘Quality profiles’ which include active rules during a code analysis.

We will see in this post, how to create a new profile with all the Cobol rules, and assign it to an existing project. Continue reading →

I am still playing with the City Model plugin for Sonar made by eXcentia.

For those who missed the previous episodes, you can find them here: City Model, City Model – New release, The ABC metric.

This plugin is really fun. And everyone finds fantastic a visual representation of the code in the form of a city. Going to the essential is important when you regularly assess the quality of applications.

Continue reading →

I have been involved recently in some discussions about the usefulness of the LOC (Lines Of Code) metric. As I explained in some previous posts, this is the first one I look at when doing an assessment of and application and its code quality. And I do it only to get an idea of the size of the application. Continue reading →

Do you remember that I got a nice Christmas gift?

It was the Sonar plugin City Model made by eXcentia and they have released a new version. This will let us the opportunity to show how to customize your own dashboard with Sonar.

Continue reading →

I got a nice Christmas gift.
I love it.

This is a Sonar plugin that has been developed by eXcentia, a spanish company located in the beautiful city of Valencia, that you already know if you are interested in sport events like America’s cup, Formula 1 or Moto GP racings and, last but not least, is also famously renowned for its … paella.

This Sonar extension, based on WebGL, is part of eXcentia’s framework QAlitaX. It provides a 3D visual representation of an application, using Sonar metrics to model it as a city. You can find it here on eXcentia web site. Continue reading →