sonar proposal, updated roadmap

[Mike Nereson]

Hey there fellas, here is the update on Sonar integration and my proposal for our roadmap.

Sonar is an "Open Source Quality Management Platform" <http://sonar.codehaus.org/> Its a great tool that provides software analysis using many great open source tools such as Checkstyle, PMD, Maven, and Cobertura to provide a dashboard will granular drill down capabilities from projects, to packages, to classes. Our project has been added to their public hosted instanced (they call this instance Nemo) I encourage you to check out Architecture Rules on Sonar <http://nemo.sonar.codehaus.org/project/index/org.architecturerules:architecture-rules-parent>.

I uncovered an issue in Sonar's issue tracker where they were discussing finding a tool that could analyze architecture so that they can add additional reporting to Sonar <http://jira.codehaus.org/browse/SONAR-501> this issue brought me to the source of the issue <http://jira.codehaus.org/browse/SONARPLUGINS-35>. I added my input to that issue. It turns out that they would prefer to utilize a project like ours more than the alternatives because our project is the most active. The alternatives have not been updated in years. Sonar also really wants to add DSM analysis reporting to thier product, so they are looking for an architecture analysis tool to handle this.

I believe that our currnet user base is pretty small. I think that there are two things that we can do to grow our user base. The first thing we can do is add new features to Architecture Rules. We can investigate the alternatives, make a list of what they provide that we dont, and begin adding those features to our tool. The second thing we can do is integrate into success projects. The first two that come to mind are Sonar and Hudson. We can also do a lot more with Maven. The easier our tool is to use, the more users we are going to get. When it comes to plugins into popular projects, our userbase could grow like a wildfire because for the user to add these plugins to their instances of those tools usually only requires a click or two.

Additionaly, over the past year or so I have been contacted by the project leaders of Sonar and Structure101, and a couple of individuals have mailed me to point out the short commings of JDepend. The main point of these emails was that JDepend works at the package level and does not give any or much information at the class level. Thats a big limitation. So eventually I would like to swap out JDepend for something else, or write our own code to analyze packages and classes.

So, given all of that, here is my proposal. I have identified a roadmap that should keep us busy for the next 6 to 9 months if we can all put in a few hours a week. This proposal pretty much covers everything that I have listed in this email thus far.

3.0 listeners, xml output
3.1 Maven 2 report
3.2 remove JDepend
3.3 DSM analysis
3.4 Maven 2 report with DSM
3.5 Hudson plugin
+ bug fixes and minor enhancements along the way

This roadmap gets us our maven reports, adds a massive new feature (DSM analysis which I think may fill an untapped niche), and gets is into Sonar and Hudson (I am pretty sure Sonar will write the plugin part for that app, but I think we'll need to write the Hudson plugin). This greatly enhances what we can do with Maven, which is by far the easiest way to run our tests, and adds great insight into the users code base via the reports.

My personal goal for this project is for it to be identified as a fundamental java analysis tool. When developers mention Checkstyle, Findbugs, and PMD (all well known, easy to use, minimal configuration analysis tools) I want them to also think of Architecture Rules.

We haven't done much with Architecture Rules for the past 6 months. I have been in an EMT class. That's done now and I am prepared to make more time for our project. I'd like to know if any of you are still interested in working on this with me, and what you think about content of this email and my proposal for the road map.

Finally, I have also invited Freddy from the Sonar project to join this dev mailing list while we discuss how and if we will integrate with them. He has not emailed me to accept the invitation yet. I will let you know if he is added.

One final note, our sites (mostly 72miles.com/architecturerules, but also architecturerules.org (architecturerules.org is supposed to be live and the primary source for information when 3.0 gets released)) are getting over 50 visitors a day, and the latest version is downloaded regularly - not to mention how ever many users are getting the jars from our maven2 repository. We still have users and really have no where to go but up from here.

Please let me know what you think and let me know if you're still into working on this project. Thanks guys.

~ Mike Nereson

[Mike Nereson]

Hello fellas.

As I mentioned in the last email. I had invited Freddy Mallet to join the dev list. Freddy is a project lead on the Sonar project and is interested in seeing Architecture Rules evolved enough to be the tool used by Sonar to report and summarize a project's architecture.

For Freddy, here are a few links

User Mailing list: http://groups.google.com/group/architecture-rules-users
Dev Mailing list: http://groups.google.com/group/architecture-rules-dev
SVN and Issue activity list: http://groups.google.com/group/architecture-rules-activity

Freddy, you are going to want to read the email I sent before this one which is a pretty good summary of where we are at right now. The message is at
http://groups.google.com/group/architecture-rules-dev/browse_thread/thread/c49004453707e728

I sent that out two weeks ago with no response from anyone yet.

I have prototyped a sample XML output that I'd like to get Architecture Rules to output. It should be enough to generate the DSM report and it is enough to drive the replacement of JDepend. I am going to post the prototype to blog.architecturerules.org by the end of the day.

Freddy, please read the message that I linked to above and share your thoughts or comments. Once you've done that I have some other thoughts for you.

Thank you.

~ Mike Nereson