Improving your gate workflow with action plans and source control support

Today i am going present some new features in 4.0.0 that hopefully will improve the review of introduced debt between gates or versions.

Usually before each software version, some companies might go through some quality gate/process to evaluate if the version is fit for release, one of the criteria to evaluate can be technical debt added during the development process. SonarQube provides a good approach to do this evaluation, differential views provide the information of what has been changed between two versions.

Usually this works well and you are able to review, assign, create plans, etc. The problem that we usually find is that some issues that are raised, are raised because profiles have changed or a new version of a static analysis tool is updated and gives slight different results or reports better results. This usually means you need to review each issue to verify if the issue has been raised against modified code or against old code.

This new introduced feature addresses this issue, now you can combine the previous information with your source control information (currently only git is supported) and filter all issues that have been raised in code that was modified after the selected date.

To do this we go to the issue search tab, and select the date from where we want to apply the filter.

From the example above at total of 327 issues (above major) have been reported, now after checking the filtering on.

We get only 87 new issues, we can now select the new issues and assign those to a new plan.

The issues are now planned to be address for the incoming quality gate. Additionally to this, the same issues can also be added to your favourite issue tracker (currently only Testtrack)

The information will be tracked after this moment in both SonarQube and in your issue tracking system giving the necessary visibility to stackholders to ack accordingly. All this has been performed inside the Visual Studio, reducing a bit the need of jumping between systems.

We have run several of these quality gate checks before and it always takes a few days to review all the new issues. With this new feature, hopefully we can bring this time to only a few minutes.