Implementation and Evaluation of a Continuous Code Inspection Platform

Sammanfattning: Establishing and preserving a high level of software quality is a not a trivial task, although the benefits of succeeding with this task has been proven profitable and advantageous. An approach to mitigate the decreasing quality of a project is to track metrics and certain properties of the project, in order to view the progression of the project’s properties. This approach may be carried out by introducing continuous code inspection with the application of static code analysis. However, as the initial common opinion is that these type of tools produce a too high number of false positives, there is a need to investigate what the actual case is. This is the origin for the investigation and case study performed in this paper. The case study is performed at Ida Infront AB in Linköping, Sweden and involves interviews with developers to determine the performance of the continuous inspection platform SonarQube, in addition to examine the general opinion among developers at the company. The author executes the implementation and configuration of a continuous inspection environment to analyze a partition of the company’s product and determine what rules that are appropriate to apply in the company’s context. The results from the investigation indicate the high quality and accuracy of the tool, in addition to the advantageous functionality of continuously monitoring the code to observe trends and the progression of metrics such as cyclomatic complexity and duplicated code, with the goal of preventing the constant increase of complex and duplicated code. Combining this with features such as false positive suppression, instant analysis feedback in pull requests and the possibility to break the build given specified conditions, suggests that the implemented environment is a way to mitigate software quality difficulties.