SONAR is a code quality management platform, dedicated to continuously analyze and measure technical quality, from the projects portfolio to the class method.
For too long, code reviews have been too much of a chore. This is largely due to the lack of quality tools available, leaving developers to resort to e-mail and bug tracker-based solutions.
We've seen a lot of time and energy wasted doing code reviews both in open source projects and at VMware. In both cases, code reviews were typically done over e-mail. A significant amount of time was spent in forming review requests, switching between the diff and the e-mail, and trying to understand what parts of the code the reviewer was referring to.
In an effort to keep our sanity and improve the process both in our open source projects and at companies, we wrote Review Board.
Review Board is a powerful web-based code review tool that offers developers an easy way to handle code reviews. It scales well from small projects to large companies and offers a variety of tools to take much of the stress and time out of the code review process.
The Animal Sniffer Plugin is used to build signatures of APIs and to check your classes against previously generated signatures. This plugin is called animal sniffer because the principal signatures that are used are those of the Java Runtime, and since Sun traditionally names the different versions of its Java Runtimes after different animals, the plugin that detects what Java Runtime your code requires was called "Animal Sniffer".
D. Menasce, J. Sousa, S. Malek, and H. Gomaa. Proceedings of the 7th international conference on Autonomic computing, page 195--204. New York, NY, USA, ACM, (2010)