It’s a process that needs to be driven from the top down for all IT projects. The reason is that quality gates need to be integrated with both the development and deployment processes of your IT project. The first step is to define what quality means for your software and how to measure it. You should align your quality criteria with your business goals, user expectations, and technical standards.
You must perform a second, subsequent analysis to trigger the quality gate. To perform a copy, you just copy a built-in profile, give it a unique name and then make it your own. When you copy a QP, you are free to activate/deactivate rules contained in the original QP. When you copy a QP, you’re breaking inheritance with the built-in profile and any future changes to the parent QP will NOT be picked up by the copied QP. To remedy this, you’ll need to periodically perform a check against that language’s built-in QP to bring things up to date. A Compare functionality is included in SQ/SC to make this periodic sync more efficient.
Preserve Security
Would you want a more radical but also more guaranteed way to prevent code that fails quality gates from reaching production? Well, in that case, you’d probably want to configure your CI/CD (continuous integration / continuous deployment) software so the build fails when code doesn’t pass the gates. With AI-driven automation, QA engineers can customize detailed code quality tests and set up Quality Gates aligned with software requirements.
SonarQube is provided with a «Sonar way» quality gate by default and read-only, so you cannot change its definition. This quality gate can be adjusted from release to release, accordingly to SonarQube’s capabilities. The «Sonar way» quality gate is provided by SonarSource, activated by default, and considered as built-in and read-only. This quality gate focuses on new code helping you implement the Clean as You Code approach.
No quality gate without a checklist
Stack Exchange network consists of 183 Q&A communities including Stack Overflow, the largest, most trusted online community for developers to learn, share their knowledge, and build their careers. Learn how to measure and maximize the business impact of your software development efforts. By keeping an eye on the cloud security companies you can quickly judge the status of your code and decide on what to do next. Now we have our container of rules, one for each language, called a Quality Profile. Each time an analysis is run against a particular language, all the active rules in that language’s Quality Profile are applied to the code being analyzed. Behind the scenes, auto-detection, via filename extension, is ensuring that the proper QP and language analyzer are invoked during the analysis.
They help to prevent defects, reduce rework, and increase confidence in the software delivery process. So, in this context, a quality gate is an automated verification you can use to enforce the adherence to one or more quality standards. Like the previous type of quality gate, this one also preserves the metaphor. Think of it as an actual gate that prevents the code from going forward in the software development lifecycle (SDLC) pipeline if it doesn’t meet the defined quality criteria. This is another quality gate that you want to build into your pipeline checks.
Measuring Code Coverage and Pass Rates Before Deployment
As long as certain code regions can be excluded from specific analysis tools, gating on that quality metric is OK. Obviously, any explicit exclusion would be a red flag in a code review and subject to extra scrutiny, but keeping such an escape hatch open for exceptional circumstances is important. The swift resolution of product issues preserves organizational agility. Without quality gates, organizations would need to spend more time troubleshooting and resolving systems.
- Now that you have a basic understanding of quality gates, let’s look at the benefits of establishing quality gates in your projects.
- Once a developer is ready to submit their code, the pipeline will take their code and build it in a container/mocked environment.
- For example, you can use code quality metrics, test coverage metrics, performance metrics, security metrics, and user feedback metrics.
- It can also drive the adoption of test automation, as it requires testing to be executed in an automated manner across the pipeline.
- Usually, these documents are defined and managed by project leaders or technical leads.
- As software projects become bigger, more development pipelines may be needed to contribute to overall product delivery.
A setup file should be present to ensure that the environment is then built to be consistent for each developer. Part of this setup should include several linting standards that will also check that certain coding principles are been adhered to. This will prevent code from being deployed where it does not meet these appropriate linting standards.
More articles on Continuous Delivery
SonarQube/SonarCloud utilize a concept called the New Code Period and by default, it’s set to ‘previous version’ for SonarQube. The New Code Period is intended to cover what you’re working on in the short term. While SQ/SC can analyze your entire codebase, that information, while interesting, isn’t immediately useful because it’s not very actionable. You’re likely not going to stop what you’re doing and go refactor your codebase. In fact, after initially scanning all your projects, the ‘report cards’ returned might be quite depressing!
It should come as no surprise, then, that having strong Quality Assurance (QA) teams and systems in place is a must for tech-focused businesses. One of the most useful tools in the Quality Assurance arsenal is that of Quality Gates. Traditionally, the biggest roadblock to quality gate implementation has been cost — both in terms of speed and resources.
Limit Quality Gates to necessary development stages
In this sample, the script section specifies the –fail-threshold option. The QODANA_TOKEN variable in this snippet refers to the project token and required by the Ultimate and Ultimate Plus linters. Before implementing any Quality Gates or tests, QA professionals must secure cooperation and buy-in from the rest of the teams involved. This means communication and collaboration are especially important between teams. Implementing a DevOps methodology generally improves communication and efficiency between teams in the SDLC.
To calculate a quality gate status for the main branch (or any other long-lived branch), a project must have a new code definition set. In this section, we will focus on the built-in quality gate, called Sonar way, which is available in every organization. By default, this is the one assigned to all new projects on import.
Security Scans on Artifacts
Extending a QP is useful when you want to extend from a baseline QP and inherit changes from it. I.e. you want an organizational QP but you want to inherit new rules added to Sonar way (the built-in QP) in the future, you’d extend instead of copy it. When you Extend a QP, you can activate rules that aren’t active in the profile(s) you inherited from. It’s a way to be more strict, not a way to relax the rules coming from the parent. Just flagging issues found in your code doesn’t do us much good though. At this point, we don’t know enough to answer the original question about whether we should merge your new/changed code or not.
How to Build Quality Gates into a Pipeline
It’s important to remember here that the results are dependent on the scanning tool itself and its configuration. Along with searching for vulnerabilities in the code, you can also use this gate to check for outdated packages and add this to the scoring system. This will help to drive continued maintenance of the code to the latest versions and reduce future tech debt. Discover new ideas and insights from senior practitioners driving change in software. Note that notifications are sent only when the Quality Gate status changes from Passed to Failed, or from Failed to Passed.
What are the best practices for designing and implementing quality gates?
These won’t necessarily form part of the automated tests unless the testing team deems it necessary, though anything that can be automated should ideally be automated. It means, you can define the quality policy in your organization, required for each kind of project. You can upgrade your quality gate to the Clean as You Code approach by clicking on Review and Fix Quality Gate.