# Are SonarQube Rules Inducing Bugs?

## TL;DR

This study evaluates the fault-proneness of SonarQube rules in open-source projects, revealing that most rules are not fault-prone and questioning the effectiveness of SonarQube's fault prediction models.

## Contribution

The paper provides an empirical analysis of SonarQube rules' fault-proneness and compares machine learning models, highlighting the limited predictive power of SonarQube's own rules.

## Key findings

- Only 25 out of 202 Java rules are low fault-prone.
- SonarQube's 'bug' rules are generally not fault-prone.
- SonarQube's fault prediction model has very low accuracy.

## Abstract

Background. The popularity of tools for analyzing Technical Debt, and particularly the popularity of SonarQube, is increasing rapidly. SonarQube proposes a set of coding rules, which represent something wrong in the code that will soon be reflected in a fault or will increase maintenance effort. However, our local companies were not confident in the usefulness of the rules proposed by SonarQube and contracted us to investigate the fault-proneness of these rules. Objective. In this work we aim at understanding which SonarQube rules are actually fault-prone and to understand which machine learning models can be adopted to accurately identify fault-prone rules. Method. We designed and conducted an empirical study on 21 well-known mature open-source projects. We applied the SZZ algorithm to label the fault-inducing commits. We analyzed the fault-proneness by comparing the classification power of seven machine learning models. Result. Among the 202 rules defined for Java by SonarQube, only 25 can be considered to have relatively low fault-proneness. Moreover, violations considered as "bugs" by SonarQube were generally not fault-prone and, consequently, the fault-prediction power of the model proposed by SonarQube is extremely low. Conclusion. The rules applied by SonarQube for calculating technical debt should be thoroughly investigated and their harmfulness needs to be further confirmed. Therefore, companies should carefully consider which rules they really need to apply, especially if their goal is to reduce fault-proneness.