Sonargraph-Enterprise is designed to collect and display metrics from all software development projects within an organization. By doing this it allows stakeholders to stay informed and to react in a timely manner, when quality metrics trend in the wrong direction. With the help of Sonargraph-Enterprise it is now easy to answer questions like "which project grew the most within the last 30 days?" or "which projects maintainability has deteriorated the most?"
In this version Sonargraph-Enterprise knows two levels of items, software systems and modules. A software system can comprise any number of modules (at least 1). We are working on extending this concept to allow for software systems to be added to arbitrary groups, that can be used to restrict access or aggregate information (e.g. by department).
Sonargraph-Enterprise has a simple user management. Right now there are only administrators and users, but this concept will be extended. You only need to login if you want to customize what you see or if you have to do administration tasks. As of now project data can be seen without logging in. When you start Sonargraph-Enterprise for the first time you will be asked to register yourself as the first user. That user will automatically enjoy administrator privileges.
The main view of Sonargraph-Enterprise is a list of software systems. For each system two configurable metrics are displayed together with information how much those metrics changed within a configurable amount of time. The table can be sorted by clicking on the column labels. Clicking on the same header twice will invert the sort direction.
When you click on one of the systems you will navigate to the landing page for that system. A page consists of two configurable metrics sets. A metric set contains up to 5 different metrics. On the right of the metric sets you will see one chart for each set. By default this displays the value history for the first metric of the set. By clicking on another metric the chart will be replaced by the value history of the new metric.
If you are on a system page, the new menu item 'Modules' will appear on the top of the page. When you click on it, it will display a list of modules belonging to this system, again with 2 configurable metrics, much like the system list. If you click on one of the modules you will navigate to the module landing page, which is structured in the same way as the system landing page.
By logging in as an administrator you have access to the 'Admin' menu. Among other things you can configure the global comparison period under 'Settings'. The default is 30 days, but when you start with Sonargraph-Enterprise you won't have enough data, so I recommend to start with 1 day and switch to longer periods as soon as more data is available. You can also upload new licenses or have a look at general statistics like database size and the total number of systems/modules.
The client key is needed to upload data to Sonargraph-Enterprise and also for downloading snapshots or reports from Sonargraph-Enterprise. Every user has his/her own unique key. This way it will become possible to control which user will have access to which particular system. You can find your client key under the menu Account/Show. JSON uploads are possible without client keys. In that case the uploaded system is considered to be public.
Sonargraph-Enterprise comes with 2 predefined metric sets which are used by the default landing pages. Those sets cannot be deleted or modified by any user. But you are free to select different landing pages by defining your own profile (see below). You can create new metrics sets by clicking on one of the 3 creation buttons on the top of the metric set list. A system metric set consists of metrics available on the level of software systems. A module metric set works with module metrics and a universal metric sets consists of metrics available on the system and module levels. Please note that most metrics in Sonargraph-Enterprise are available on both levels.
A page consists of two metric sets. Again we differentiate between system pages, module pages and universal pages. You can create your own landing pages and switch to any available page using the 'Switch Page' button.
A profile allows you to customize what you see. There is always the 'Default' profile, which cannot be changed or deleted. By creating a new profile and switching to it you can customize the metrics displayed in the system and module lists as well as the landing pages for systems and modules. Additionally you can configure the length of the time series charts displayed on any page. The default is 90 days. Your current profile is stored in cookie so that if you are using Sonargraph-Enterprise from the same browser it will remember the last profile you used and switch to it automatically.
Sonargraph-Enterprise only displays high level metrics and does not allow you to drill down into the details directly. But it stores snapshots and reports for all systems for which data is uploaded unless you use the more simple JSON upload. In Sonargraph-Architect you can directly open snapshots from Sonargraph-Enterprise. All you need to do is to configure the URL and the client key of the Sonargraph-Enterprise server in the preferences. By opening the snapshots you can perform a much more detailed analysis of a given system. Another plus is that the snapshot does not require any development environment and contains the complete source code of the system.