Sonar, an open-source project from SonarSource, which is a development team hosted at Codehaus.org, is the recipient of this year's Jolt Productivity Award.
The product consists of a remarkably detailed dashboard that provides metrics and analysis of project health from many perspectives. The principal testing component consists of a code inspection feature driven, in the case of Java, by more than 600 rules. The results of this analysis, along with data such as duplicate code, test coverage, and cyclomatic complexity are all displayed on the dashboard in a way that enables managers and developers to assess the code quality of a project quickly.
An additional feature enables the viewer to go back in time and see how various quality metrics have improved or degraded over time. These historical numbers ensure that projects are moving in the right direction.
Sonar is designed to work especially well with Maven projects written in Java. However, due to a large ecosystem of plug-ins, other languages can be covered and data from many third-party tools can be integrated into the dashboard.
For providing a project manager's best friend — an at-a-glance view of a project's health, much of which derives data generated by the product's own code analysis &mdash Sonar is awarded a 2010 Jolt Productivity Award.
