What needs improvement with SonarQube?

One of the disadvantages of SonarQube is that it is quite comprehensive, which is both good and bad. Depending on the tool's configuration, sometimes you get false alarms that are unimportant to you.

In our organization, C/C++ programmers are preferring to use CodeSonar than SonarQube, so I believe the tool needs to be more compatible and user-friendly for the specific C/C++ language. The solution provider can evaluate how SonarQube can be integrated with AI in future versions similar to how Copilot is working with Outlook and GitHub.

After scanning our code and generating a report, it would be helpful if SonarQube could also generate a solution to fix vulnerabilities in the report.

SonarQube needs to improve its ease of use, integration with third-party platforms, and scalability.

The detection and reporting are structured, with reporting being better compared to other tools. However, in terms of analysis and findings, other tools provide more in-depth insights and detailed steps to mitigate or handle issues. Therefore, the analysis engine of SonarQube could benefit from significant improvements to better compete in the market.

SonarQube could be improved by implementing inter-procedural code analysis capabilities, allowing for a more comprehensive detection of defects and vulnerabilities across the entire codebase. Additional functionality that could improve SonarQube includes features like automatic code correction and AI-generated suggestions to streamline code maintenance.

It would be a great add-on if SonarQube could update its database for vulnerabilities or plugging parts.

SonarQube could improve its static application security testing as per the industry standard. It would be really great if I could extract the overall report that I see in the dashboard.

The product needs to integrate other security tools for security scanning.

I think the code security can be improved. Code security should comply with the standard security list. I would like to see the feature of Compliance Reporting added to the solution.

Currently, we are doing SonarQube's validations for external configuration via XML. It would be better if SonarQube provided a good UI for external configuration.

The product must improve security analysis. It must introduce software composition analysis in future releases.

The individual metrics are OK, but the aggregation to Technical Debt and overall rating may give doubtful results. For example, we had a system of generated Java which was definitely difficult to maintain, but it had a good rating (it goes too far to explain this false positive case here). Engineers may know when to take the numbers seriously, but it may be difficult to explain to management when to consider and when to ignore these aggregations.

The product's pricing could be lower.

Normally, SonarQube gives a quick response for scanning and is easier for integration.

Sometimes, I compiling through, but SonarQube crashes during scanning. Even with the -X option, I cannot easily get what error has happened.

This solution could be offered on Docker and the cloud. The support for this solution could be improved and the customization rules could also be made simpler.

It should be user-friendly. I keep looking for improvements after every update. PeerSpot users give SonarQube an average rating of 8 out of 10. SonarQube is most commonly compared to Checkmarx: SonarQube vs Checkmarx. The SonarQube brand is trusted by many teams and it has been validated. It is one of the most recommended free application security testing solutions. SonarQube is really a good tool for SAST with seamless integration to your CI/CD pipeline. We have used it on our website and had good results.

SonarQube can improve by scanning the internal library which currently it does not do. We are looking for a solution for this.

We previously experienced issues with security but a segregated security violation has been implemented and the issues we experienced are being fixed. We have also experienced duplications of rules within the system as well as code samples that are short of ten numbers.

The learning curve can be fairly steep at first, but then, it's not an entry-level type of application. It's not like an introduction to C programming. You should know not just C programming and how to make projects but also how to apply its findings to the bigger picture. I've had users who said that they wish it was easier to understand how to configure, but I don't know if that's doable because what it's doing is a very complicated thing. I don't know if it is possible to make a complicated thing trivially simple. They could improve their documentation. There were some books written about it, but even when we first started using it, the books were out of date. It's more of a plea to some of the authors who have become experts in using it to revise their books. I'd buy a copy of it. SonarQube does a good job of supporting the open-source community, but some of the documentation tends to lag behind. That's not unique to SonarQube. It gives an opportunity to those who have taken the time to learn about it to author books and become resident experts or community experts. It'd be nice if some of those guys made another edition to support the open-source efforts that are there. In terms of features, at this point, I don't have any requirements. We've been growing into it slowly, and we haven't really exhausted what it already has. When and if we get to a point where we are aggressively applying what it's telling us, we may reach a point where it's like, "If it could tell us this as well, that'd be nice." We haven't reached that point yet. We haven't listened to all of the advice that it's giving us now.

There isn't a very good enterprise report. They also do not have an application report. We'd like for them to work on this aspect.

The Enterprise edition has the additional features we need, but of course we have to pay for that.

SonarQube could be improved with more dynamic testing—basically, now, it's a static code analysis scan. For example, when the developer writes the code and does the corresponding unit test, he can cover functional and non-functional. So the SonarQube could be improved by helping to execute unit tests and test dynamically, using various parameters, and to help detect any vulnerabilities. Currently, it'll just give the test case and say whether it passes or fails—it won't give you any other input or dynamic testing. They could use artificial intelligence to build a feature that would help developers identify and fix issues in the early stages, which would help us deliver the product and reduce costs. Another area with room for improvement is in regard to automating things, since the process currently needs to be done manually. Aside from other helpful features, the most important thing that SonarQube needs to do—the key feature—is to detect security vulnerabilities. The rest of the other features are helpful to the developer and the team to deliver the product faster, but security is a mandatory feature. As for additional features, SonarQube covers most of the languages, but there is still room for improvement covering the latest version of the tech stack—for example, Java 13. They're still improving, and they're focusing on SonarCloud nowadays. Currently, we aren't using all the top quality features of SonarCloud. I also think it would be helpful if SonarQube could integrate with Jira, a work management tool, or other communication tools, like Skype or Microsoft Teams, so that a bot could report directly to the developer.

SonarQube's detail in the security could be improved. It may be helpful to have additional details, with regards to Oracle PL/SQL. For example, it's neither as built nor as thorough as Java. For now, this is the only additional feature I would like to see.

A little bit more emphasis on security and a bit more security scanning features would be nice. It would also be nice if the discrepancy between the basic or free version and the enterprise version was less. In my opinion, some of the base functionality in the enterprise version should be in the basic version. Currently, we have static code scanning, and we have the scanning of the Docker containers. It would be great if some sort of penetration testing could easily be implemented in SonarQube for deploying something and doing some basic security scans. Currently, we have to use third-party tools for that. If everything was all under one roof, it would be more comfortable, but I don't know if it is possible or feasible. It is a typical issue of centralization versus distribution. In our particular case, because we're using SonarQube for almost every other project, it would make sense, but that doesn't necessarily mean that it is the same case with everybody else.

The only features which I think are lagging are the reporting to generate a PDF report. That is not available currently in the development version. However, if it is available in the development version, then it will be really helpful for us. I checked with the team and it seems that it is only available in the enterprise version. If the report can be sent over email, that would really help. For example, let's say if I need to report to management or management wants to see a dashboard based on what each project looks like. Those figures are not available. There needs to be a shareable reporting piece or something we can click and generate easily. The only pain area for us is due to the fact that we purchased the 1 million lines of code license for now. We are a service product company, so some projects were finished in maybe less than six months and then maybe that is not useful for us. We need to remove those projects so we can utilize those lines of code for another project. That's something we need to see about. We're not sure how that works.

The software testing tool capability could improve. It does not always integrate well. You have to use a specific plugin and the plugin does not always go in Apple's applications. In the next release, they should add the ability to analyze containers.

We had some issues scanning the master branch but when we upgraded to version 7.9 we noticed it does scan the master branch but we had to do a workaround for it to happen. This process could be improved in a future release. What we are seeing is for some of the Javascript projects SonarQube is not reading all the files. We had to manually configure it to accomplish what we wanted. However, we probably needed some documentation that we did not have that explained this process. In an upcoming release, it would be beneficial to have the ability to use multiple applications under one project, and if we want to scan one of the applications we can just switch to that application, this would be really helpful.

The solution could improve the management reports by making them easier to understand for the technical team that needs to review them.

One thing to improve would be the integration. There is a steep learning curve to get it integrated.

SonarQube is missing specific SAST capabilities. In addition, when we have security issues we want to mitigate those and it seems that SonarQube doesn't persist with the mitigation. Each time it discovered a new scan it wiped out all the persistence that we had mitigated for previous vulnerabilities. Dynamic scanning is missing and there are issues with security scanning in terms of failing projects where it didn't pass a scan.

We have to combine several products in order to cover as many flaws that might exist in the code. We have to integrate several products to set the security functionality of the product. SonarQube should have better functionality to cover all areas of security limiting our need for other products. We have tens of millions of code to be analyzed and processed. There can be some performance degradation if we are applying Sonar Link to large code or code that is complex. When the code had to be analyzed is when we ran into the main issues. There were several routines involved to solve those performance issues but this process should be improved.

The solution is still maturing a bit. You may need to purchase add-ons to get the useability you desire.

The solution could improve by providing more advanced technologies.

The solution could improve by having better-consulting services.

There is room for improvement in the code security space which is not as extensive as it could be. There are other products on the market which are much better in terms of code security scanning. I'd also like to see improvement in support which is quite expensive.

Technical support and the price could be better.

SonarQube is great product for static code analysis. But the setup of the same takes lot of time and is tricky depending on the language in scope. For example, for .NET it needs different dependencies to be installed compared to Java. I would expect that SonarQube at the time of installation should take care of these dependencies download and install as part of the package. This will make it easy to use. And from feature stand point, I recommend including API scanning and checking API security vulnerabilities. This will be a great value add. Another great enhancement will be to include SCA capabilities within the same product.

The solution has a very shallow SAST scanning. That is something that can be improved. I'm not sure if there is any plan for having DAST, as well, which is the dynamic scanning. If they offered that in SonarQube that would be ideal. I'd like to know if there is a plan or roadmap for Sonar to have that included. However, right now, at least, from the SAST perspective, it can improve. The pricing could be reduced a bit. It's a little expensive.

Having a tool that is comprehensive in nature is very useful because otherwise, we have to run through multiple tools in order to get the entire viewpoint of a particular set of code. For example, we use SonarQube in combination with Nexus, which is another product that gives us some other information. I guess when it comes to the gamut of things that we are looking for including static code quality, static testing, and dynamic testing of security. Having performance regression would be a helpful add on or ability to be able to do during the scan. In an upcoming release, I would like to see the dynamic security testing feature available. I would like to point out that they could already offer this feature but I have not been that deep into the solution to know yet.

There are times that we have the database crash. However, this might be an issue with how we have configured it and not a software issue. Apart from this, I do not see any issues with the solution.

If you don't have any experience with the configuration or how to configure the files, it can be complicated. The installation needs to be more user-friendly, as well as the interface, which could be more user-friendly.

The scanning part could be improved in SonarQube. We have used Coverity for scanning, and we have the critical issues reported by Coverity. When we used SonarQube for scanning and looked at the results, it seems that some of them have incorrect input. This part can be improved for C and C++ languages.

SonarQube is used for static testing, not for dynamic. We found a solution with dynamic testing, and are looking to find a solution that can be used for both types of testing. I would like to see software included that can be used with Waterfall projects.

The results of exporting capability could be improved. Currently, exporting is a bit messy and fully dependent on the SonarQube environment. Sonar Qube offers REST API and you could export the results programmatically, but the process is quite slow and limited. You could extract the maximum 10000 results per query, which increases the overall execution process tremendously. I guess the majority of the users are based on Sonar Qube presentation capabilities, which is very restrictive for some use cases.

From a reporting perspective, we sometimes have problems interpreting the vulnerability scan reports. For example, if it finds a possible threat, our analysts have to manually check the provided reports, and sometimes we have issues getting all the data needed to properly verify if it's accurate or not. This is especially important when considering false positives, and often we have issues getting all the necessary information from SonarQube in order to determine whether it is a true vulnerability or a false positive. Another suggestion for improvement is that SonarQube could be better when it comes to integration with different development pipelines for continuous monitoring. For example, whether you are scanning manually or on-demand, we would like more ways to integrate SonarQube into our pipeline so that we can get reports quickly and automatically as we work.

In terms of what can be improved, the areas that need more attention in the solution are its architecture and development. Additionally, the QA team also needs work in different aspects. When you think about the support area - when the support team has an incident they need to do a hostage. When they do that they do a commit in the version control. These commits trigger a new build process and this process needs validation from SonarQube because we need to validate the quality of the software product for different cases and different aspects.

We also use Fortify, which is another tool to find security errors. Fortify is a better security tool. It is better than SonarQube in finding errors. Sometimes, SonarQube doesn't find some of the errors that Fortify is able to find. Fortify also has a community, which SonarQube doesn't have. Its installation is a little bit complex. We need to install a database, install the product, and specify the version of the database and the product. They can simplify the installation and make it easier. We use docker for the installation because it is easier to use. Its dashboard needs to be improved. It is not intuitive. It is hard to understand the interface, and it can be improved to provide a better user experience.

It would be better if the users could have quick access to the features. Monitoring is a feature that can be improved in the next version.

It does not provide deeper scanning of vulnerabilities in an application, on a live session. This is something we are not happy about. Maybe the reason for that is we are running the community edition currently, but other editions may improve on that aspect.

The interface could be a little better and should be enhanced. More support for integration with third-party products would be an improvement.

We could use some team support, but since we are using the community version, it's not available. Also, because we are using the community version, we have some problems from time to time regarding the SSO logins. Sometimes you need more time to configure things, to edit some profiles. SonarQube has come to the end of the project phase. The development team doesn't really utilize this because it's in the product development phase. They need more paths and delivery — they don't really care about security. But now, since we are also certified technical security, we can go ahead and provide that for them. In short, communication needs to be better. Automation could be better. Sometimes by default, you need to configure some rules regarding detection. You need to have some parameters set regarding false-positive risk.

In terms of solving for security breaches in the code, we are looking for different tools to help us catch things much sooner. Right now, we're not doing so well on this front. Therefore, we are looking for some other options in the market. I'm not the one who is tasked with looking at the moment, however, we are actively seeking out a more effective option for the static code analysis. There are sometimes security breaches in our code, which aren't be caught by SonarQube. In the security area, SonarCube has to improve. It needs to better compete with other products. The solution could offer some sort of alert feature. We've had an incident, where somebody removed the solution from the pipeline and there were a couple of code instances that were pushed and married with the codebase without passing through SonarQube. It would be nice if we were alerted to that. If the solution is off-line or turned off, we'd like to be able to tell so that we can decide if it should be on or if it was a mistake. It would be great if it could support testing and configurations a bit more.

Since we are using the community version, we have had some issues. For example, we have had some difficulties with the Single Sign-On (SSO) login. We tried to integrate with our Azure ID to have access to login, but it doesn't always update. We have to search for more forums, or in other communities for technical IT. The documentation is not clear and it needs to be updated. As it is the community version we don't have team support and rely on the documentation that is available. We are creating more disciplines to do peer reviews on SonarQube. There is time spent on creating the tools but not the documentation that is needed for support. It takes time to configure and create profiles. We need to improvise the way we introduce new tools. We have only integrated the source code, but there are things that are not being utilized because it is product-driven and there needs to be more path and delivery. Since we are now certified, we are utilizing more and we are creating an environment for security. We need more emphasis on the security side. Support needs to improve with their response time. There is a lack of local partners/vendors in our region and we are having difficulties finding vendors looking for another partner. In the next release, I would like to see some automation scripts. At times by default, you have to configure some of the rules in the detection. You need some parameters to be set that define the source code, such as those required to eliminate a false positive. They advance their product without addressing security or internal codes.

I am not very pleased with the technical debt computation, it's a bit arbitrary. The codification metrics could also be improved.

If I configure a project in SonarQube, it generates a token. When we're compiling our code with SonarQube, we have to provide the token for security reasons. If IP-based connectivity is established with the solution, the project should automatically be populated without providing any additional token. It will be easy to provide just the IP address. It currently supports this functionality, but it makes a different branch in the project dashboard. From the configuration and dashboard point of view, it should have some transformations. There can be dashboard integration so that we can configure the dashboard for different purposes.

Integration could be better in SonarQube in the free version. It does not have any bug tracking tool, like Jira. They are not integrated with enough additional programming tools. There is one issue with the dashboard. The dashboard which is there is okay. But sometimes if we have to work on multiple issues the application is giving us errors. Say we have five issues. All five issues might not be very important, so in cases where there are multiple issues, we would just want it to give us a warning about the important issue. It may be we will get to work on the things of greater importance and over-all have a better solution and we do not have to fix all five. Something like that would be good to help us to prioritize things so then we do not have to go into all the issues and fix them. We do have this categorization for major and minor issues, but let's say, again, if there are five major issues. I would like to maybe get a score involving the prioritization of these. Out of these five major issues, we should know which issue should be fixed first. This would give us a backup for planning and organizing the prioritization. It is that kind of data that we do not get on the dashboard. If we could, that would be helpful to give priority to the correct issues.

Our developers have complained about the Quality Gates and the number of false positives that this product reports. Their older code is breaking and with the Quality Gate on the pipeline, they are not able to safely release at this point. This means that they have to add a lot of things to the whitelist, so there is room for improvement in this regard.

The library could have more languages that are supported. It would be helpful. There are a few clauses that are specific to our organization, and it needs to improve. It's the reason that were are evaluating other solutions. It creates the ability for the person who releases the authorized release, which is not good. We would like to be able to expand on our work. MicroFocus, as an example, would be helping us with that area or creating a dependency tree of the code from where it deployed and branching it into your entire code base. This would be something that is very helpful and has helped in identifying the gaps. It would be great to have a dependency tree with each line of your code based on an OS top ten plugin that needs to be scanned. For example, a line or branch of code used in a particular site that needs to be branched into my entire codebase, and direct integration with Jira in order to assign that particular root to a developer would be really good. Automated patching for my library, variable audience, and support for the client in the CICD pipeline is all done with a set of different tools, but it would be nice to have it like a one-stop-shop. I would like to see improvements in defining the quality sets of rules and the quality to ensure code with low-performance does not end up in production. We would also need the ability to edit those rules.

There are various standards that are followed. Awareness is a must. Product awareness is something that I would recommend. If the users are not aware of how to use the product, they won't understand the features.

The reporting can be improved. In particular, the portability report can be better. I would like to see better integration with the various DevOps tools.

It should keep up with newer technologies. As this is primarily open-source, it does require updates from the community. As such, there is sometimes a delay for new technologies to be covered by this too. Particularly around the languages that the webpages state they support. The big benefit of Sonar is that it handles so many different languages, problems, and static analysis in one place. When that one place has a low coverage for the most basic rules (OWASP top 10 for example) it starts to lose its value add.

When performing the code coverage function, there are a lot of warnings that come up and you may not have time to solve them. You need to have the ability to overrule warnings or issues because it may not be possible to commit the time to resolve them immediately. If the product could assist us with fixing issues by giving us more pointers then it would help to resolve more of the warnings without such a commitment in terms of time. SonarQube needs some improvement in its ability to find security-related issues.

Although it has Sonar built into it, it is still lacking. Customization features of identifying a particular attack still need to be worked on. To give you an example: if we want to scan and do a false positive analysis, those types of features are missing. If we want to rescan something from a particular point that is a feature that is also missing. It’s in our queue. That will hopefully save a lot of time.

With the aesthetic code analyzer or dynamic code analyzer, we would like to see zero vulnerabilities. This is actually currently not available with any available code analyzer so it is not the fault of this one product. We would like to see that the latest CVE (Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures) gets represented. This would be more useful but does not always happen. If we have more of an idea of the likelihood of zero vulnerabilities then the product is more useful for user communities.

I would like to see something around mutation testing included in SonarQube. I'd like to see some mechanism of quality which has real meaning. The problem in metrics is that they're correlated. I'd like to see how they can add a feature to detect genuine quality, instead of numbers that people can game. The number can be manipulated. There are a few ways to do this, and mutation testing is one of them. I would also be interested in more security scanning.

It would be nice is SonarQube analyzed external libraries, in addition to our current code. I would like to see more options for security, beyond the basics like SQL injection.

I find that some of the graphs around the measures are too fancy, and they do not mean a whole lot to me. The solution is a bit lacking on the security side, in terms of finding and identifying vulnerabilities. By comparison, we run the same piece of code through both SonarQube and Checkmarx and there is no comparison between the vulnerabilities that each finds. Checkmarx may find fifty, whereas SonarQube will only find fifteen or twenty.

Improvements could be made in terms of security. I would like to see dynamic code analysis in the next version of the software.

The security portion of this solution needs to be improved. They do have a few rules, but I don't think that they are of much use because you cannot position it as a security scanner. I think that there is a lot more that can be done in the security space. I would like to see, for example, more security updates as part of the scan. The reporting is good, but I am not able to download a specific report as a PDF, so downloading reports is something that should be looked at. We would like to be able to perform differential scans for a few modules or a few lines, rather than for the whole source code each time.

We've been using the Community Edition, which means that we get to use it at our leisure, and they're kind enough to literally give it to us. However, it takes a fair amount of effort to figure out how to get everything up and running. Since we didn't go with the professional paid version, we're not entitled to support. Of course, that could be self-correcting if we were to make the step to buy into this and really use it. Then their technical support would be available to us to make strides for using it better. On the other hand, there are published books available. However, the one problem I ran into is they were a little bit out of date. They're still very helpful, but we had to kind of translate from the previous version that was covered in the published books to what's actually available now. An improvement I would like to see would be on the part of the authors to come out with a new edition or revision that covers some of the newer features of SonarQube and newer configurations. I'd buy a copy. In terms of additional features, it's actually a very complete solution from what we have seen. Again, I would like the authors to revise their books. I think even ordinary people that are using the licensed model with direct support could walk through some different use cases, just from having been around the block a few times. There are enough things that the software does that this could be very beneficial. Even beyond the technical issues of installation, there are further use cases that could be helpful. For instance, how to get the big bang from the buck out of it.

This solution finds issues that are similar to what is found by Checkmarx, and it would be nice if the overlap could be eliminated. The plugins are not well documented.

I haven't really done a comparative analysis yet. We're in the process of figuring out how to automate the workflow for QA audit controls on it. I think that's perhaps an area that we could use some buffing. We're a Kubernetes shop, so there are some things that aren't direct fits, which we're struggling with on the component Docker side, nothing major. Kubernetes is a container-based run-time that works with Docker in terms of container-based applications, so we're a microservice based solution. Microservices are contained inside these containers which are managed by a run-time called Kubernetes. Kubernetes comes out of a Google enterprise. It's used by organizations like Netflix and apps to do continuous development deployment and use integration and development. It means that your container has this application lodging, around which all of the user authentication, run-time controls, and communications integration are handled by Kubernetes. For instance, an application doesn't really see its DNS at all. It's completely abstract in a way. It is layers away from a virtual hardware. What it does is abstract that patient component into a nice package of business logic that is managed in a dynamic container, which takes care of all the run-time and communication issues that normally become a lot of the configuration overhead of an application. Once you get your Kubernetes environment behind and organized, that forms a very efficient way to introduce these microservices in a dynamic way and to easily integrate and upgrade components rather than applications. You're much more granular in terms of your release capabilities and much more efficient in terms of how it's released and managed. I would rate this around seven out of ten, because it has what we need, and it's easy to use.

A robust credential scanner would be a huge bonus as it would remove the need for yet another niche product with additional cost, also gives the benefit of a single pane of glass view, although we still need white source bolt for 3rd part library scanning. The integration into docker builds could be better as pulling the latest version of the scanner, setting the path and then invoking the scan is an extra overhead to manage between versions of the scanner. An apt-get and scan start with the key passed as a variable would be a nicer implementation. Have not looked into SSL for the management page yet but hoping that goes smoothly.

The product's user documentation can be vastly improved.

I would like to see SonarQube implement a good amount of improvements to the product's security features. Another aspect of SonarQube that could be improved is the search functionality.

As far as code quality goes, I like it. It doesn't seem to do well when it comes to vulnerabilities on the security side. It may be that we don't have the right plugins, or we don't have the right add-ons.