Teamscale Integration for Visual Studio Code

Teamscale Integration for Visual Studio Code

Teamscale is your platform to ensure high-quality software. It is based on a revolutionary approach to static code analysis: Teamscale is a platform not only to collect some metrics, but to combine them with essential data from your development, to aggregate them and to provide solid decision criteria for the fundamental questions during your software development. Teamscale addresses your code quality, but also your test quality, your architecture and your usage scenarios. This means Teamscale supports you throughout the entire life-cycle of your software development.

This VS Code extension provides integration of the core Teamscale features directly into your VS Code development workflow. The extension synchronizes your code with the Teamscale server and displays analysis results as highlights in your code and listed in the Problems panel.

How it works

You need a Teamscale server that analyzes your code. Teamscale is available here: https://www.teamscale.com. We offer free licenses for open source projects.

Once your server is set up to analyze your code repository, you need to

1. put a .teamscale.toml configuration file in your code folder: https://docs.teamscale.com/reference/teamscale-toml/. The file defines how the code in your folder corresponds to the code on a Teamscale server.
2. Configure your Teamscale user account in VS Code (add username and access key in the user settings).

Then the extension will automatically sync your code with the Teamscale Server. Use the Open File in Teamscale action to verify whether the setup worked.

Activation

The extension will be activated automatically when it's installed and your code folder contains a .teamscale.toml file.

Features

Displaying Findings on your Code

"Finding" is our name for any diagnostics our analyses detect on your source code. Since static analyses always have some corner cases where their results are not 100% correct, we use the neutral term "finding" instead of issues/smells/bugs/warnings/errors and let you decide.

This extension can display findings that are computed on the Teamscale server in your IDE.

If you enable the "on open/save" analysis option, the extension sends your code to the server whenever you switch to another text document or save it (and shows the updated findings after some seconds, depending on the analysis speed of the server).

You can always trigger the analysis manually with the Start analysis on current file command.

Enable Flagging a Finding as "Tolerated" or "False Positive"

You don't like one of the findings? If the finding is technically correct, but you prefer to not "fix" it at the moment (or ever), you can mark it as "tolerated" and it will disappear from your findings list. If the finding is just wrong and our analyses have a bug, you can mark it as "false positive". In either case, you can still review the flagged findings and the flagging rationales in a special Teamscale page later.

To access either of these actions, have a look at the "quick fix" actions of a finding/diagnostic.

Open File in Teamscale UI

The context menu of each file contains an Open File in Teamscale action. That opens the Teamscale page for the file in your web browser. The Teamscale web UI offers a lot of features and analysis results that go beyond what we can display in this VS Code extension, so please have a look at the web UI when you want some more insights on your code.

Found a Bug?

If you encounter any errors or have suggestions for improvement, please feel free open a support ticket at https://teamscale.com/support or contact us at support@teamscale.com. I appreciate your feedback and will do my best to address any issues you may have. Thank you in advance!

Limitations

This VS Code extension can't analyze code in notebooks. Since Teamscale requires code that is mostly syntactically correct and we expect that notebooks contain a lot of code snippets for illustation (which are often not syntactically correct on their own), we do not support analysis of code in notebooks.

Troubleshooting

If the extension does not work as expected, please have a look at its output messages. Open the "Output" tab and select the "Teamscale Integration" output channel in the dropdown field. The extension will print log messages for each executed action here.

Some Known issues are listed below.

Requirements

You need a Teamscale server that analyzes your source code and a user account on that server. https://www.teamscale.com

Enjoy!

Known issues

• Error ... has been compiled by a more recent version of the Java Runtime (class file version 61.0), this version of the Java Runtime only recognizes class file versions up to 52.0

Your Java version is older than the version with which we compiled the part of the extension that communicates with the Teamscale server. Please install a recent Java version and make sure your JAVA_HOME environment variable points to that installation directory.