I recently blogged about software factory tools, but now I have to rant about one of those tools.
Sometimes, it seems, for non-technological reasons, a software editor will, perhaps intentionally, make the new version of its software worse than the previous one. Windows 8 comes to mind.
I did not expect a minor release of SonarQube server to fall into this category, but release 6.2 seems like a man-made disaster to me. The creators of SonarQube decided that it would be a good idea to suddenly and irrevocably remove several of its central features. They removed the distinction between unit and integration tests because it’s too hard for them to deal with. That could really mess up the data in your customized reports, but don’t worry – they also deleted your custom reports! All of them!
Apparently they removed dashboards and widgets because they don’t want SonarQube to be “seen as a multi-purpose aggregation and reporting tool”. It’s true that as of 6.1 the reports they generated automatically were pretty good, but the reports you meticulously set up that your boss has been using in executive progress reports ? Gone forever. The only alternative is restoring the SonarQube database and re-installing version 6.1 without ever having the possibility to upgrade again. How’s that for progress?
The Green Bar 