Does continuous inspection still work with Sonar 5.1.X?

Question

I'm trying to run a preview analysis for a (Java) project of ours with SonarQube 5.1.1. I am able to get a local report generated, however I get no coverage data, and I also get the message [INFO] [XX:YY:ZZ.ZZZ] Build Breaker plugin is no more supported in preview/incremental mode.

If I check here, the page says that Starting with SonarQube 5.1, the Build Breaker plugin does not work any longer in the preview & incremental modes..

I'm confused - I thought that for continuous inspection one needs the build breaker plugin. Is that no longer so? Has the concept in SonarQube changed?

Why am I not getting coverage data when running a preview analysis?

Answer 1

I don't know where you've read this, but continuous inspection is not specifically related to the preview/incremental mode nor to the build breaker plugin - it's not even related to SonarQube (even though it has been pushed by SonarSource from the very beginning).

Here are the key points:

• Continuous inspection is about analyzing your code as often as you can in order to monitor (and eventually improve) the quality of your code. Whatever the tool.
• On SonarQube, this means running analyses that will push information on the server so that you can monitor what's going on and take the required actions for your application portfolio.

Obviously, when you are a developer, you'd like to manage those issues early, before they even get pushed to the source code repository. But experience tells us that preventing any code push because of issues is a bad pattern - because some issues might be false-positive or not relevant in the context (and still you want - and have the right, to push your code). This is why we feel that the build breaker plugin is not aligned with all this, and it will be replaced in upcoming versions of SQ by native features that match better these concepts:

• Very efficient code analysis to display issues in the IDE at the speed of light - but without computing metrics
• Preview mode that will compute everything and make it possible to check quality gate before pushing code to the source code repository - without impacting the results on the server
  • and in this case, using some specific information found in the logs, it will be possible for a CI to fail a build