Sonar Category Explainations

Question

Can anybody suggest a one/two line explanation of the "five" sonar categories, in such a way that a non-developer can understand what the percentage figure means.

• Efficiency
• Maintainability
• Portability
• Reliability
• Usability

Answer 1

This represents for each category the density of violations (non-respect) of rules in the source code.

Answer 2

One word "synonym" for non-developers (not exact synonym though, but enough to give a quick idea):

• Efficiency : performance
• Maintainability : evolution
• Portability : reuse
• Reliability : resilience
• Usability : design

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Most of those metrics are presented in this Wikipedia entry

• Efficiency:

Efficiency IT metrics measure the performance of an IT system.
An effective IT metrics program should measure many aspects of performance including throughput, speed, and availability of the system.

• Maintainability
  .
  is the ease with which a product can be maintained in order to:

  • correct defects
  • meet new requirements
  • make future maintenance easier, or
  • cope with a changed environment

.

• Portability:

the software codebase feature to be able to reuse the existing code instead of creating new code when moving software from an environment to another.

• Reliability:

The IEEE defines reliability as "The ability of a system or component to perform its required functions under stated conditions for a specified period of time."

Note from this paper:

To most project and software development managers, reliability is equated to correctness, that is, they look to testing and the number of "bugs" found and fixed.
While finding and fixing bugs discovered in testing is necessary to assure reliability, a better way is to develop a robust, high quality product through all of the stages of the software lifecycle.
That is, the reliability of the delivered code is related to the quality of all of the processes and products of software development; the requirements documentation, the code, test plans, and testing.

• Usability

studies the elegance and clarity with which the interaction with a computer program or a web site (web usability) is designed.

Usability differs from user satisfaction insofar as the former also embraces usefulness (see Computer user satisfaction).

See for instance usabilitymetrics.com