A few nuggets from using TFS/VSTS and SonarQube in your builds

The cool thing about SonarQube is that once it is set up it works immediately and it provides a lot of value for your teams.

After a while you will notice there are things that might be refined or improved in how you integrated the two tools, here are some I feel can be quite useful.

Bind variables between Team Build and SonarQube properties

I feel this is quite important – instead of manually entering Key, Project Name, Version, etc. you should be using your variables. Try to reduce manual input to a minimum.

Branch support

SonarQube supports branches with the sonar.branch property. This would create a separate SonarQube project you can use for comparison with other branches.

Analyse your solution once

Don’t be lazy and add just a task at the beginning and one at the bottom - you should scan one solution at the time and complete the analysis. This will solve the typical Duplicate project GUID warning you will get if you have multiple solutions in the same scan.

Exclude unnecessary files

It is so easy to add a sonar.exclusion pattern, do it to avoid scanning files you are not interested in.