Can NDepend 6 and SONAR work together?

Introduction

As I wrote in this post, one of the greatest feature of NDepend were its “great Visual Studio integration in order to display your technical debt directly inside the IDE”.

NDepend can also be integrated as part of your continuous integration pipeline in order to make the analysis of technical debt results public for the whole team (or just break the build under certain conditions). There are a lot of official documentation about how integrate NDepend 6 with Team City (as a build server) or SONAR (as a quality metric tool).

But let’s start with my own experience setting up NDepend 6 and SONAR and checks the benefits of integrates both tools.

Integrating NDepend with SONAR

NDepend 6 comes with support for SONAR integration. The process is pretty forward and is well described on the documentation. After follow such steps you will get all NDepend’s rules imported into SONAR and you can activate them into a Quality Profile for instance the Full Analysis for C#. 

NDepend rules imported in SONAR

The issues could start when you run an analysis for large projects with several violations. If you run (the runner) with –X the stack trace will show you the java.lang.OutOfMemoryError as the exception. But nothing that can’t be solved following this recommendations: 

1. Run sonar-runner with x64 JRE. 
2. Increase the heap size by turn this line:

%JAVA_EXEC% %SONAR_RUNNER_OPTS% -cp "%SONAR_RUNNER_HOME%\lib\sonar-runner-dist-2.4.jar" "-Drunner.home=%SONAR_RUNNER_HOME%" "-Dproject.home=%PROJECT_HOME%" org.sonar.runner.Main %*

             into this one

%JAVA_EXEC% -Xmx3062m -XX:MaxPermSize=512m -XX:ReservedCodeCacheSize=128m %SONAR_RUNNER_OPTS% -cp "%SONAR_RUNNER_HOME%\lib\sonar-runner-dist-2.4.jar" "-Drunner.home=%SONAR_RUNNER_HOME%" "-Dproject.home=%PROJECT_HOME%" org.sonar.runner.Main %*

            in the sonnar-runner.bat file.

The results

SONAR is an isolated server that receive the results from “inspection agents”. Actually the inspection results are committed directly into SONAR database and the SONAR web application or dashboard displays the results in a centralized way. 

So, as you expected (and so do I), after run an inspection via sonar-runner, the NDepend's rules violations are displayed as SONAR's issues, just like this.

NDepend's violations as SONAR's issues

So, now you can manage (assign, resolve, or comment) such issues trougth SONAR interface. 

Conclusions

As you should know at this point, the answers is yes. NDepend 6 can work together with SONAR. But as you can also see I have a lot of work to do. So, I’m not sure what I’m doing writing this blog post ;).

SONAR dashboard

PS: This is not a "Do as I say, not as I do" post. As I also said, the "important thing is, not to accumulate technical debt and fix it as soon as it is detected". The sample reports shown on this post intentionally includes source with a tons of defects. Most of them comes from tests / PoC assemblies and auto-generated code.