SonarQube is a very powerful open source platform for managing code quality. Among others, you can collect code metrics, identify issues in our source code (i.e. display results from static code analysis) and visualize results from unit tests.

A very powerful feature of SonarQube is its extensibility. You can add plugins to our installation and adapt the platform according to your needs. It is also very nice that you develop our own plugins. Developing own plugins requires a bit of understanding how the platform works, but it is not very difficult.

Jorge Hidalgo has written a very nice introduction how to develop plugins. His tutorial complements the introduction provided by SonarQube.

My first attempt to write a plugin was a simple widget that allows to embed an iframe into the SonarQube dashboard. With this dashboard I’m in the position to display external data.