What exactly is the meaning of False-positive operation in sonar?

Question

When I encounter a violation in Sonar (in violation drilldown tab), in the source code view Sonar has some action like comment, assign, etc, one of those is False-positive, I want to know what exactly is the meaning of this operation, and when should I use it?

Answer 1

As any automatic tool, Sonar - and the rule engines it relies on (Findbugs/PMD/Checkstyle/...), can make "mistakes" while raising a violation: only a human can detect this, and you have the ability to flag this "mistake" as a false-positive to be sure that you won't spend time on it again.

Obviously, this feature must not be used to mute real violations. What's more, each time you flag a violation as false-positive, a good habit is to write a meaningful comment (and also report the issue on the user mailing list of the corresponding tool).

Answer 2

False-positive is then the software tells you there is a violation but you know better (like there is a reason, better than laziness, why the statement is poorly written) and this way you can mark the encounter as "Done The Right Way".

However, this functionality is sometimes used to get "clean" report for the manager. It's the worst that could happen.

Generally speaking - you should not use it.