Analysis Modes in SonarQube 5.2

Question

I'm currently trying to make sense of the analysis mode changes in SonarQube 5.2. The change of the full mode to publish is simple enough, but it's removal of incremental mode and addition of issues mode that is really throwing me.

Previously, it was suggested that incremental mode could be used to see issues in just those files which changed, while preview mode would analyze the entire project. Is this still the case with issues mode?

My project is huge (1-3 hours to analyze from scratch) so having the ability to just analyze incrementally for things such as pre-commit checks or Github integration is pretty much a must to make the tool usable by our developers.

Any clarification that folks can provide would be appreciated.

Answer 1

We decided to rename preview mode to issues mode since this is more clear: this is all about issues (no computation of duplication, coverage, differential measures, ...).

Having a real preview mode (ie a real publish analysis with no commit of results in the end) that would allow to check quality gates is planned for 5.4: https://jira.sonarsource.com/browse/SONAR-6763

We also removed the incremental mode that was very badly named. In fact it was 'just' a partial analysis. You can (nearly) achieve the same result by filtering input files using sonar.inclusions. But we know that for pre commit analysis it can be interesting to automatically optimize the issues analysis by only executing sensors on changed files. That's why we will introduce something similar (but not exactly the same) in 5.3 that should be released by the end of December: https://jira.sonarsource.com/browse/SONAR-6931