SonarJ 6.0 Released

New dashboard aggregates key metrics in one place

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.