What is SonarQube and What is not?

It’s a code quality management platform that allows developer teams to manage, track and eventually improve the quality of the source code.  It’s a web based application that keeps historical data of a variety of metrics and gives trends of leading and lagging indicators for all seven deadly sins of developers.

Sonar is an open source platform used by development teams to manage source code quality. Sonar has been developed with a main objective in mind: make code quality management accessible to everyone with minimal effort.

As such, Sonar provides code analyzers, reporting tools, defects hunting modules and TimeMachine as core functionality. But it also embarks a plugin mechanism enabling the community to extend the functionality (more than 35 plugins available), making Sonar the one-stop-shop for source code quality by addressing not only developers but also managers needs.

Main Feature of SonarQube

SonarQube provides the capability to not only show health of an application but also to highlight issues newly introduced. With a Quality Gate in place, you can fix the leak and therefore improve code quality mechanically.

Our code analyzers are equipped powerful path sensitive dataflow engines to detect tricky issues such as null-pointers dereferences, logic errors, resource leaks

One place to provide a shared vision of code quality for developers, tech leads, managers and executives in charge of a few to a few thousands projects and also to act as a toll gate for application promotion or release.

SonarQube integrates with the entire DevOps toolchain including build systems, CI engines, promotion pipelines… using webhooks and its comprehensive RestAPI.

With SonarQube comes a code analyzer for each major programming language. Each analyzer provides numerous rules to spot general and language-specific quality issues.

SonarQube is NOT a build tool. Period. There are several tools out there like Maven, Ant, Gradle etc. that do a perfect job on that field. SonarQube expects that before you analyze a project it has been already compiled and built by your favorite build tool.

SonarQube is NOT (only) a static code analyzer : It’s not a replacement for FindBugs or CPPCheck or any other similar tool. On the contrary, not only it offers its own static code analysis mechanism that detects coding rules violations but at the same time it’s integrated with external tools like the ones I mentioned. The result is that you can get, homogenized, in a single report all issues detected by a variety of static and dynamic analysis tools.

SonarQube is NOT a code coverage tool : Clearly NOT. Again it’s integrated with the most popular test coverage tools like JaCoCo, Cobertura, PHPUnit etc. but it doesn’t compute code coverage itself. It reads pre-generated unit test report files and displays them in an extremely convenient dasboard.

SonarQube is NOT a code formatter. It’s not allowed to modify your code in any way. However you can get formatting suggestions by enabling the CheckStyle, CPPCheck, ScalaStyle rules you want to follow.

SonarQube is NOT a continuous integration system to run your nightly builds : You can integrate it with the most popular CI Engines to apply Continuous Inspection but it’s not their replacement.

SonarQube is NOT just another manual code review tool. Indeed SonarQube offers a very powerful mechanism that facilitates code reviews but this is not a standalone features. It’s tight to the issues detection mechanism so every code review can be easily associated to the exact part of the problematic code and the developer that caused it.

Reference
https://www.sonarqube.org/
http://softwaregarden.io/sonarqube/