Fabien DUMINY’s blog

The 15th of september, I attended to the software quality evening of the Paris JUG.

Romain Pelisse and François Le Droff has presented us some open source frameworks for quality control :

• to control the code
  • pmd : can detect usage of float/double instead of BigDecimal
  • hammurapi
  • FlexPMD : like pmd but for the flex language
• to detect copy/paste
  • pmd-cpd
  • simian
  • condenser
• to analyse the code
  • JDepend
  • JavaNCSS : you should replace it by Sonar squid, which is an optimised version of JavaNCSS because it’s better maintained and integrated with Sonar.
  • CAP (Code Analysis Plugin) for eclipse
• to manage quality (by aggregation and historization)
  • XRadar : metrics aggregation, quality historization
  • Sonar : Olivier Gaudin has spoken about version 2.0, expected for the end of the year, and announced that it will includes design metrics

Next, Frederic Brachfeld has presented SonarJ community edition, a software allowing to split logically an architecture in vertical and horizontal layers. It checks that forbidden dependencies are not realized. The analysis is done from java bytecode or from source code, knowing that source code can provide more informations. Java server pages (jsp) are also managed if you have the compiled classes. SonarJ can be used standalone or as an eclipse plugin with a real time view of architecture violations. Another advantage of SonarJ is that it allows you to see the structure of a software you don’t know.

To finish, Fabrice Bellingard has presented Squale (Software QUALity Enhancement), an open source quality evaluation platform, based on the audit notion and that proposes an action plan to improve the score for the quality of the analysed software. The proposed plan indicates how to get a maximum of quality improvement with a minimum effort. Even if the effort notion is an empirical thing, squale is a research project put in production in the industry in more than 100 applications. Squale is part of the thematic group « free software » in the System@tic competitivity center. Qualixo, the creator of squale, is involved in the quality evaluation club‘s workgroups to define the iso 9126 standard, related to evaluation of software quality.

Thanks to that evening I have discovered new open source softwares that I didn’t know, especially the ones controlling the quality of a software design. I should test them to see if they could be useful for JNode.