Everyone knows the famous principle edicted by Tom DeMarco: “You can not control what you cannot measure”. Everyone does of course agree with this sentence. Yet many people who work in software engineering – responsible for projects, managers, stakeholders, and even quality consultants – make decisions in terms of budget, schedule and teams without the necessary measures that could enable them to control their projects.

These people know that a code analysis tool could produce these measures, but they do not have a technical background and they think that such a tool is complex to install and to use, so they will reserve its use to ‘specialists’.

After our last serie about analysis of ABAP code with SONAR, let’s start a new one about the installation of an analysis environment with SONAR.

You know nothing about Java, JDK or Tomcat, you don’t know how install a database, much less SONAR or Jenkins? This series is for you.

You work in a Cobol or SAP project team, you are a tester in the QA world, a Quality consultant specialised in function points but who has never used a code analysis tool, you are one of the persons mentioned above who must make decisions on a project, you want to measure for better control? This series is for you.

Objectives

We will have different posts, the first one about our environment. Then we will successively install the following softwares:

• A JDK or Java Development Toolkit, with a Java run-time to run J2EE applications as Sonar, Jenkins or Tomcat.
• Tomcat, a Web applications manager.
• Oracle, the famous database.
• SONAR.
• The Sonar-Runner.
• Jenkins and the SONAR plugin for Jenkins.

And we will conclude this serie by analyzing code with SONAR, in order to ensure that our analysis environment is operational, and to present how to configure such an analysis.

There are all kinds of different ways to use SONAR for various ‘use cases’ and organizational processes, and also all kinds of installations. A Java programmer who wants to use SONAR in a Continuous Integration process would not necessarily proceed in the same way that we will present in this series. So keep in mind that this way is not the only one, and that even in the context of our objectivees, we could do differently.

However, the installation procedure I will show will allow you to have a code analysis workstation, simple to use, and that can produce the measures that we need to assess the quality of applications.

See you soon for the first post of this series!

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