News

Today hello2morrow released version 6.0 of its award winning software architecture and quality governance tool SonarJ. The new release comes with a bunch of significant new features and improvements:

• The new dashboard aggregates the most important metrics on a single page and highlights potential problems using traffic light colors.
• A new metric "structural debt index". This metric allows you to measure the overall structural debt in your application and is roughly proportional to the effort needed to get rid of the structural debt in your system.
• Creating a new system is now easier than ever. A wizard guides you through all the needed steps and you can directly import software systems not only from Eclipse, but also from Maven.
• Build units have been added as physical type containers to simplify the mapping between Maven or Eclipse projects and SonarJ projects. A build unit contains a set of source or class file root directories and is typically mapped directly to a Maven project or an Eclipse project. A SonarJ project can contain any number of build units.
• The patterns to assign types to architectural artifacts are now much more powerful. You can use strong patterns to force the assignment of a type to a specific architectural artifact regardless of restriction imposed by the parent artifact. You can also use weak patterns to match types, that have not been matched by any other (stronger) pattern.
• SonarJ now allows you to define quality models. A quality model is a set of metric thresholds, that can be used to enforce specific quality guidelines. As a good starting point we ship two ready-to-use quality models with the new release. the "essential" model can be used as a simple starter for continuos integration, while the "extended" model defines more thresholds and is especially useful when looking for problems in unknown code.
• The new sand-boxing mode allows you to try architectural ideas and refactorings without affecting the original system design.
• SonarJ can now also generate reports based on RTF templates. These reports can be easily be customized by using any program able to edit RTF files (e.g. Microsoft Word).
• The architecture view has a new view option "highlight restrictions". Selecting an architectural element in this mode will mark all other elements in green or red. Green elements are accessible from the selected element, while red elements are not accessible.
• A new version of our plugin for sonar (sonar.codehaus.org) with support for the new metric "structural debt index".
• Many more minor improvements and bug fixes (please check the release notes for more details).

All users with a valid support contract are eligible for a free upgrade.

The newest release comes with a bunch of new features and usability improvements:

• SonarJ is now able to locate duplicate code blocks with a very efficient high-performance algorithm. This will help you to avoid problems caused by copy & paste programming.
• New package level refactorings make our virtual refactoring engine even more powerful. Most virtual refactorings can be easily delegated to Eclipse for execution.
• The classes and sources analyzed by the Eclipse plugin can now be managed much more flexible, so that SonarJ can work effectively even if your project is only opened partially.

Please check our release notes for a full list of enhancements and improvements.

An updated version of our Sonar plugin will follow within the next couple of days.

There are various improvements over all the Soto tool components. Some of them are:
Sotoarc's architecture modeling concept works more fine-grained. Besides whole packages it is now possible to assign single source files to architecture modules. This makes it possible to split the content of packages/namespaces/directories architecturally without being forced to do any package restructuring. The Sotoarc cycle analysis feature has been enhanced and the GUI has been made more intuitive, in many respects. A main enhancement is the ability to receive an immediate graphical feedback when cutting a set of dependencies which leads to a break up of dependency cycles.
The Sotoarc checking engine now scales to larger projects and the Sotoarc GUI has been streamlined in many aspects. Java annotations are now detected by the Soto Java parser, stored in the Soto repository and can be analyzed via a set of predefined metrics. The analysis of C/C++ code with respect to template specific references has been improved. There is also a new, comfortable tool integrated which collects all the built data (Include paths, Defines) which are required for a precise C/C++ parsing.
Sotoarc/Sotograph customers will receive the new release as a part of their valid maintenance service.

Today we released the first version of our plugin for Sonar. Sonar is an umbrella tool for many different aspects of code quality. It comes with plugins for CheckStyle, Cobertura, FindBugs, PMD and other popular code analysis tools. The SonarJ plugin is the first plugin for Sonar that allows to check architectural and structural aspects of your project. These aspects have the biggest impact on testability, maintainability and comprehensibility of your code.

If you use the plugin with our free structure analysis license it will provide useful metrics that measure the structural debt and the level of cyclic package dependencies in your project.

If you already have a license for SonarJ-Report the plugin will provide more metrics and add Sonar violations for all architecture violations, threshold violations and open tasks. Have a look at the plugin documentation if you want to know more.

The new release comes with a couple of major new features and improvements. Moreover 5.0 was the first release where our customers directly influenced our development schedule and task list by using the product feedback forum on our website.

The following features and improvements have been implemented:

• Support for the Spring Framework is now built into SonarJ. SonarJ is able to recognize dependencies defined in Spring Configuration files. This was a feature heavily pushed by our user community.
• Revolutionary visualization and breakup tool for cyclic dependencies. Now you are able to visualize all cyclic dependencies in your system. The breakup analyzer computes all possible breakup sets, so that you can untangle your code with the least possible effort.
• Our Eclipse plugin can now reload modified architecture descriptions automatically. This was also a feature requested by our users.
• Comfortable many to one mappings from Eclipse projects SonarJ projects. This is especially useful when your project is split into many smaller sub-projects.
• The performance of the parser has been improved dramatically. Moreover the memory consumption of SonarJ has been reduced. A new option allows you to skip source file parsing. This is very helpful when you want to analyze systems with more than 30,000 classes.
• Completely new metrics view with histograms and pie charts.

You can try the new release for free by either requesting an evaluation license or make use of our free community license. The community license is limited to projects with up to 50,000 byte code instructions (approx. 20,000 lines of code).

hello2morrow GmbH (Germany) and hello2morrow Inc. (USA), now offer their software analysis tool set Sotoarc/Sotograph also for ABAP and ABAP Objects. This is the first tool for easily checking architectural structures of SAP R3 programs. The new product has been developed jointly with our partner C1 WPS GmbH (Germany). C1 WPS is a specialist for software architecture, software architecture analysis and quality assurance. They provide comprehensive consulting and coaching in the areas of introducing and using Sotoarc and Sotograph (the range of Soto services offered by C1 WPS: http://www.c1-wps.de).

Sotoarc is the software analysis tool for software architects, technical project leads, and quality professionals. Using Sotoarc, they are able to

• visualize and understand the static structure of an existing software system
• model a prescribed architecture for the software system graphically
• detect architecture violations, i.e., deviations of the code structure from the prescribed architecture
• simulate restructurings of the software system for enhancing the structure without touching the source code

Sotoarc's graphical user interface allows to look at an ABAP software system on a very high abstraction level and to drill down to the concrete source code. With the integrated focusing technique it is possible to analyze the dependency structures even of very large ABAP systems. In Sotoarc, an architecture blueprint can be quickly and simply modeled with graphical means (drag&drop). Also complex architectures with nested modules and layers and with interfaces on different abstraction levels can be defined.

The tool automatically compares the architecture model with the implemented source code. All deviations are directly visible in the GUI on a high abstraction level and can be tracked down to their source code locations via zooming. Sotoarc also supports the user in the planning and simulation of source code restructurings. It is possible to simulate changes of the code structure in the Sotoarc GUI; the effects on the global architecture are immediately shown in the graphical view of the tool.

Sotograph additionally computes a large number of predefined metrics and provides queries for analyzing the system. Also duplicated code blocks and cyclic dependency structures are found. Sotograph can compare different versions of an ABAP system and highlights important modifications. In this way, quality requirements can be monitored continuously and with small effort even for systems that are developed elsewhere. The continuous monitoring and comparison of new versions can be automated via batch scripts.

Sotoarc and Sotograph are also available for systems written in Java, C# or C/C++.

For more information on Sotoarc/Sotograph for ABAP, please contact info@hello2morrow.com (phone: +49-89 548479-41) or sotographie@c1-wps.de (phone: +49 40 51 32 26 82). Evaluation versions are also available from there.