Sonar - UI for best user experience

Sonar has one of the most boring user interfaces I think I've ever seen -- it's butt ugly! but, as ugly as it is there's no denying how useful it is.

 

The image above shows an extract from a publicly shared project. I really liked the layout that they used so I took a few of their ideas and added some of my own.

A dashboard should be simple, provide enough information about the project ,but not overwhelm the user. If your customers or stakeholders have access to this they may not be technically minded and so this page should show info that anyone can understand.

Dashboard

To change the dashboard, log in as the admin user and on the right of the page select "Edit Filter":

You should be presented with some new options:

The column headings that I have selected are:

• Lines of code
• Rules compliance
• Unit test success (%)
• Coverage
• Complexity /method
• Complexity /class
• Public documented API (%)
• Duplicated lines (%)
• Total Useless Code (plugin)
• Build date

To add these, select the center dropdown in the Add Column row of the Display window.

Project Layout

When you select a project from the name column on the dashboard you will be presented with a page like the following:

Now this is where you can geek out and go crazy with metrics. Hopefully, by this point the non-techies have seen what they wanted and left. This page is where you can get creative.

I hope i'm not generalising too much but I would like to think most technically minded people are working with widescreen monitors for maximum productivity. If this is true I would strongly advise going for a three column layout. This can be done by selecting "Edit Layout" on the right and choosing the tri-colum option.

Finally, to select the widgets you want to display press "Configure widgets" and then you can drag and drop them at your desired locations.