Tell us about Sonar
Sonar is the leading company in ensuring quality and security for code development. The company was founded in 2008 with the mission of helping developers prevent code quality and security issues from ever reaching production. Having struggled with proactively managing code quality and security himself, Sonar’s founder Olivier Gaudin created the now popular open-source solution SonarQube, which quickly went viral in the developer community providing the software industry with the first automated Clean Code solution.
While many aspects of software development have changed – like the rise of DevOps and the adoption of AI coding assistants – our goal has not. For over 15 years, Sonar has focused on one mission: solve the multi-trillion-dollar challenge of bad code.
Arguably, there has never been a more crucial or influential time for Sonar amid the rise of AI. Sonar recently rolled out new features in SonarQube and SonarCloud that help the industry strike the necessary “trust and verify” balance, offering tools that support innovation while maintaining the high-quality code essential to the software we depend on every day.
When developers use Sonar AI Code Assurance, organisations can ensure that the AI-written code receives the high level of quality and security reviews that are expected from developers. Sonar AI CodeFix allows developers to seamlessly resolve issues detected by Sonar’s code analysis engine with a single click, directly within their workflow.
Sonar analyses all code, regardless of who writes it—humans or AI—resulting in more secure, reliable, and maintainable software. Today, our solutions support over 30 programming languages, frameworks, and infrastructure technologies. Sonar is currently used by over 7 million developers and 400,000 organisations worldwide, including the Department of Defense, Microsoft, NASA, MasterCard, Siemens, and T-Mobile.
What do you think makes Sonar unique?
Sonar leverages a unique “Clean as You Code” approach that encourages developers to fix issues early. Our quality gates alert developers in real-time when there’s something to fix or review in changed or added code. Sonar provides feedback on analysis through multiple avenues, including right in the DevOps platform user interface where the developer is working. What’s more, we offer real-time guidance on issues detected, with explanations and how to remediate them, adding valuable education for developers of all experience levels. Developers can avoid the accumulation of buggy code and technical debt right at the start.
Sonar integrates seamlessly into CI/CD workflows, helping teams automate code quality checks as part of their software development lifecycle. This reduces friction, ensuring that code quality is consistently monitored without disrupting development workflows. Our robust support for a large number of programming languages allows organisations with diverse tech stacks to manage code quality centrally.
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What most excites you about Sonar?
AI coding assistants are revolutionising the software development industry, with AI-generated code being adopted at a rapid pace. Too often though, proper accountability of this code isn’t being taken. Human oversight of AI-generated code is crucial to ensure accountability for code quality and security. Sonar helps organisations embrace AI in software development safely and effectively.
We encourage developers and organisations to take a “trust and verify” approach to using AI. By pairing AI assistants with Sonar, organisations can be confident that their AI-generated code is high-quality, maintainable, reliable, and secure.
Whether code is AI-generated or written by humans, our Clean Code solutions help ensure high code quality standards for every project at every step of the workflow.
How has the company evolved over the last couple of years?
Sonar is a developer-first company. We help developers write better code and, in turn, build better software throughout the development process—starting at the IDE through the CI/CD pipeline. Over the years, we’ve cleaned trillions of lines of code and helped millions of developers build better-performing, more reliable software.
This has not changed with the introduction of AI coding tools. Sonar ensures code is consistent, intentional, adaptable, and responsible, making our solutions the best quality assurance for adopting AI in software development.
What can we hope to see from Sonar in the future?
We’re continuing to evolve at Sonar to stay current with the latest developments in AI — AI Code Assurance and AI CodeFix are just the beginning. Today, millions of Sonar users can detect issues in their code by leveraging Sonar’s unique IP and rich knowledge base built up over a decade. Now, at the click of a button, developers can use Sonar AI CodeFix to automatically generate solutions to the issues.
As a company, we continue broadening our offerings and expanding our global reach to better serve customer needs and improve user experience.
