Sonar Differential Alerts

Question

I've got a quality profile in Sonar which will alert if the number of Violations goes up since the previous analysis, e.g. "Alert if Critical Issues since previous analysis is greater than 0".

The problem with this is that when you run a subsequent build without any code changes (or perhaps an innocuous code change) the alert is cleared.

Is there a way to get Sonar to compare its results against the last analysis that did not contain any alerts?

EDIT: I should make it clear that the "difference since previous version" option will not work for our setup as we're employing a Continuous Delivery strategy, in which each build is a potential release candidate with its own unique version (we're using a date/time stamp as the version).

EDIT #2: I have also tried setting the value sonar.timemachine.period4 to a hardcoded version that I want to compare against; however this value is not accessible when configuring the Alerts, and is certainly ignored during an actual analysis.

Answer 1

After poking around in Sonar's source, a colleague and I came up with a workaround solution.

Set up your quality profile using the "previous version" comparison wherever you actually want to compare to the last good build.

For each build:

• Query the last VCS tag with a build version and assign it to a variable called ${LAST_GOOD_BUILD} or similar for the rest of your build process to use.
• Run Sonar with -Dsonar.timemachine.period3=${LAST_GOOD_BUILD} (also making sure the BuildBreaker plugin is active)
• If you get no alerts, the next build step needs to record your new version in a VCS tag;

This works because sonar.timemachine.period3 is the same setting as "previous version" in your quality profile, but you are now replacing it with a hard-specified version of your choosing. Every time you build, you are tagging only the builds that pass quality checks, and when you run Sonar, you're only comparing against these good versions.

Pretty horrid, but it gets our build pipeline up and running again. If anything's unclear about the above, please let me know and I'll update this "solution".

CAVEATS: Your version numbering cannot be whole integers - Sonar will interpret this as the number of days between your current analysis and the one you want to compare with! Also, it cannot be in a format that could be confused with yyyy-MM-DD (e.g. 1000-01-01) as if this also happens to resolve to a real date, then you are inadvertently specifying the start of a date range. I've not yet seen anyone specifying version numbers that way, but you never know.

Answer 2

No but you can configure SonarQube to base your differential views on previous_version or on a date. See http://docs.codehaus.org/display/SONAR/Differential+Views#DifferentialViews-DifferentialViewsSettings