JetBrains Product Insight: Qodana

This is our next product insight blog in the JetBrains series. This time we focused on Qodana and spoke to Polina Popova, Qodana Product Manager.

What is Qodana?

Qodana is a code quality assessment solution for identifying and categorizing critical errors in CI pipelines, such as logic and license problems. You can use Qodana to set up quality gates in your CI pipelines, visualize the state of your code, and increase code readability, scalability, and security.

Qodana features:

• JetBrains IDEs engines power static code analysis in any CI pipeline.
• The ability to create custom inspections for teams with specific business cases.
• Static code analysis for over 60 languages.
• Detection of vulnerable dependencies.
• Integration with JetBrains IDEs and VS Code.
• Third-party licence audits.
• And much more!

Depending on your needs, teams can use a cloud-based option or host a private version on-premises.

Who is Qodana for?

Qodana is for teams of software developers that want to maintain confidence in the quality of the code they deliver, block poor-quality code from meeting the main branch, and ensure that they’re following best practices.

The solution is also valuable to managers and senior leadership who want to ensure their teams are aligned on their standards for code quality and deliver high-quality code with no critical bugs or vulnerabilities.

If you care about product quality and maintainable code that is easy to extend, support, or refactor, Qodana is a good option for your team.

Why should you use Qodana?

JetBrains has been perfecting code analysis for over 20 years using the feedback of millions of community members. Qodana relies on the linters of JetBrains IDEs and brings their intelligence to the CI side, offering a range of benefits that include:

• Reduced maintenance costs: As high-quality code is easier to understand, debug, and maintain, Qodana helps reduce the time and resources required for ongoing maintenance and support.
• Faster development cycles: By ensuring clean, well-structured code, Qodana empowers developers to implement new features and changes more quickly, leading to quicker release cycles and a quicker time-to-market. Plus, Qodana doesn’t just report problems. It suggests automatic fixes, too.
• Budget optimisation: Qodana calculates licences per active contributor only, so it won’t cause unexpected expenses or charge you for expanding your project. It’s also free for open-source projects.
• Integration with tools developers use daily: Thanks to its smooth integration with any CI pipeline, JetBrains IDE, and VS Code, Qodana’s results are easy to work with regardless of the tool you're most comfortable with. Are you looking to scan for a specific problem or ensure that guidelines unique to your project are followed? You can easily integrate Qodana with third-party linters or create your own inspections.

Which use cases show Qodana in action?

Qodana can be used in real-world scenarios to:

• Visualise the state of your code and find critical problems quickly.
• Establish quality gates to ensure that bugged code doesn’t land in production, which is especially useful for AI-generated code.
• Build custom inspections to ensure your specific code quality requirements are met.
• Fix issues instantly with an automated pull request (PR) generation.
• Run licence audits to ensure you’re compliant.

What is your favourite Qodana feature, and why?

In my opinion, default and customisable inspection profiles are one of Qodana’s smartest and most practical features. Our starter and recommended inspection profiles equip you with the most efficient rules from thousands of inspections.

You can also customise your profile to include only those aspects that you find most important. Furthermore, with FlexInspect you can create your own inspections and tailor them to your unique business needs. I am also very proud of our Licence Audit and Quick-fix features, as well as the flexibility of our quality gates.

Do you have any Qodana tricks and tips to share?

Sure! If you’d like to monitor code coverage, you can find the statistics in the upper-right corner of the Qodana report UI. This can help determine how effectively your code is covered by unit tests.

You can also use Qodana Cloud to review Qodana reports from various projects, explore development trends, and analyze your team’s overall performance.

I would also recommend setting up automatic fixes for specific issues with our Quick-fix feature. You can view a list of our Quick-fix strategies.

Do you have any resources that you recommend customers interact with for their learning?

In this tutorial, TechWorld with Nana takes you through the fundamentals of CI pipelines and how Qodana fits into code quality workflows. You can also look at Qodana’s documentation or dive deeper into how it helps you measure critical code metrics. Finally, explore the blog to learn about topics such as using Qodana for JavaScript, game development, C and C++, Spring, and much more.

Find out more about Qodana plans and pricing

If you'd like a free Qodana trial, a product demo, or some licensing advice, or if you simply have a question, please fill out the form below.