Code Quality Testing code-quality-testing

Learn how code quality testing of pipelines works and how it can improve the quality of your deployments.

Introduction introduction

Code quality testing evaluates your application code based on a set of quality rules. It is the primary purpose of a code-quality only pipeline and is executed immediately following the build step in all production and non-production pipelines.

See Configuring Your CI-CD Pipeline to learn more about different types of pipelines.

Code Quality Rules understanding-code-quality-rules

Code quality testing scans the source code to ensure that it meets certain quality criteria. This is implemented by a combination of SonarQube and content package-level examination using OakPAL. There are over 100 rules, combining generic Java rules and AEM-specific rules. Some of the AEM-specific rules are created based on best practices from AEM Engineering and are referred to as custom code quality rules.

Three-Tiered Ratings three-tiered-gate

Issues identified by code quality testing are assigned to one of three categories.

Ratings ratings

The results of this step is delivered as Ratings.

The following table summarizes the ratings and failure thresholds for each of the critical, important and information categories.

Dealing with False Positives dealing-with-false-positives

The quality scanning process is not perfect and will sometimes incorrectly identify issues which are not actually problematic. This is referred to as a false positive.

In these cases, the source code can be annotated with the standard Java @SuppressWarnings annotation specifying the rule ID as the annotation attribute. For example, one common false positive is that the SonarQube rule to detect hardcoded passwords can be aggressive about how a hardcoded password is identified.

The following code is fairly common in an AEM project, which has code to connect to some external service.

@Property(label = "Service Password")
private static final String PROP_SERVICE_PASSWORD = "password";

SonarQube will then raise a blocker vulnerability. But after reviewing the code, you recognize that this is not a vulnerability and can annotate the code with the appropriate rule ID.

@SuppressWarnings("squid:S2068")
@Property(label = "Service Password")
private static final String PROP_SERVICE_PASSWORD = "password";

However, if the code was actually this:

@Property(label = "Service Password", value = "mysecretpassword")
private static final String PROP_SERVICE_PASSWORD = "password";

Then the correct solution is to remove the hardcoded password.

Content Package Scanning Optimization content-package-scanning-optimization

As part of the quality analysis process, Cloud Manager performs analysis of the content packages produced by the Maven build. Cloud Manager offers optimizations to accelerate this process, which are effective when certain packaging constraints are observed. Most significant is the optimization performed for projects that output a single content package, generally referred to as an “all” package, which contains several other content packages produced by the build, which are marked as skipped. When Cloud Manager detects this scenario, rather than unpack the “all” package, the individual content packages are scanned directly and sorted based on dependencies. For example, consider the following build output.

If the only items inside myco-all-1.0.0-SNAPSHOT.zip are the two skipped content packages, then the two embedded packages are scanned in lieu of the “all” content package.

For projects that produce dozens of embedded packages, this optimization has been shown to save upwards of 10 minutes per pipeline execution.

A special case can occur when the “all” content package contains a combination of skipped content packages and OSGi bundles. For example, if myco-all-1.0.0-SNAPSHOT.zip contained the two embedded packages previously mentioned and one or more OSGi bundles, then a new, minimal content package is constructed with only the OSGi bundles. This package is always named cloudmanager-synthetic-jar-package and the contained bundles are placed in /apps/cloudmanager-synthetic-installer/install.