Release: Qualicen Scout 5.4-1

We are proud to announce the latest release of our automated quality analysis tool: Scout 5.4-1. In this release we incorporated many new features, and improved existing ones. In this blogpost we provide a brief overview of the most important changes.

Improved User Interface

We greatly improved our user interface. The biggest changes are:

• New navigation: New vertical and collapsible menus to get a better overview;  such as clean and easy project selection.
• Compact UI: Several superfluous menu and filter options are removed.
• Improved findings perspective:  We reduced the height of the findings entries, allowing for more information in findings phrases and the tolerated / false positives toggle has a better position.
• New tasks perspective: The tasks perspective enables you to group several findings to a task and track progress on that task.
• Improved documentation: We updated the Scout documentation to incorporate the new features.

Better Quality Analyses

No new Scout release is complete without improving what Scout already does so well: Quality Analysis. We further improved the quality analyses in order to increase precision and consistency. Besides the technical side we made the findings easier to understand.

• Improved clone-detection: Clone detection has now less false positives and more transparent clone groups.
• New Smell Densities: The old “overall Smell density” is replaced by two new densities according to our new smell groups: Content Smell Density and Structural Smell Density, which consider whether a quality defect corresponds to a whole artifact, or to precise locations in an artifact.
• New Smell Empty Action or Check: Our old Smell Action Check Confusion is now split up into two new smells: Action Check Confusion which detects content which is in the wrong column of the test description and Empty Action or Check, which detects test cases, where no Action or no Check is present in the test description.
• Less false positives: All analyses are now improved to detect UI phrases and to avoid false findings in them.
• Extended and unified findings-filtering and smell-configuration: All smells now have unified filter options and enable even more elaborate false positive filtering.

More Connectors

We can now connect to more data sources and improved the stability of existing connectors.

• New PTC Integrity connector: You can now analyze requirement data hosted in PTC Integrity.
• VSTS connector cache: The VSTS connector now caches expensive server requests and subsequent analyses are much faster.

Miscellaneous

• Faster Analyses: We worked a lot under the hood of Scout. This leads to much faster analysis times especially for reanalyzing a project.
• Pre-Commit-Analyses: We now support the pre-commit REST-endpoint allowing to get quality analyses before storing the artifact on the project repository.
• Several larger and smaller bug fixes.