Code Quality Initiative

Why Code Quality Matters

• Your code is your asset
• Keeps your cost down as you grow
• Increase robustness, maintainability, security, performance, scalability, extensibility, etc.
• Prevention is the best medicine

Challenges with Code Quality

• Often talked about in theory but not actually practiced
• Hard to measure or prove
• Difficult to plan and prioritize

Sonar – Quality Management Platform

http://www.sonarsource.org/

• Open source and extensible
• Manages code quality with:
  • Views of all projects at a glace, drill down to source code, differential, hotspots
  • Coding Rules
  • Unit Tests
  • Standard Metrics
  • Time Machine
  • Integration with tools such as PMD, Findbugs, Checkstyle, JSLint, Clover, Cobetura, Hudson (many plugins available)

Static Code Analysis (SCA)

• Applies rules to find potential bugs, anti-patterns, and code style violations
• Catches problems as early as possible in the development process
• A well-established industry practice for validating the quality of source code
• Can be automated and tracked by tools like Sonar

Downloads

Blackboard Learn custom PMD rules and Sonar Java profile

The latest version is attached to this post. Please install Blackboard custom PMD rules before importing Java rule set.

How to install Blackboard custom PMD rules:

1. Copy bb-.html-rules.jar and bb-rules-sonar.xml files to ${Sonar_Home}/extensions/rules/.html
2. Make sure the files have read rights for Sonar
3. Restart Sonar server
4. Verify that Bb* rules exist from a Java profile’s coding rules list

How to use Blackboard’s Java rule set:

1. Log in to Sonar as a user with Administrators role
2. Navigate to “Configuration” -> “Quality Profiles”
3. Click on “Restore profile” link located on the top right of the page
4. Select bb-sonar-profile-java.xml and click on “Restore profile” button
5. Specify the Sonar analysis configuration to use the restored profile