DevOps / CI Setup

TiCS consists of two analyzers, TiCS Client and TICSQServer which can be used for specific purposes. TICSQServer will create new measurement points in the database. TiCS Client creates temporary single shot measurements that are not stored in the database. TiCS Client reads from the database to compute delta's against its own measurement.

In CI, TICSQServer is typically used to measure code bases on regular intervals on main branches. TiCS Client is run on branches that originate from the main branch or on changes not yet pushed to main. Both analyzers can apply quality gating to make sure the code base meets your quality requirements.

Authentication

In order to use a TiCS analyzer, authentication might be required. Therefore a token associated with a specific role should be provided:

TiCS Analyzer	Role
TICSQServer	TiCS Analyzer
TiCS Client	TiCS Client

It is recommended to prepare a token before proceeding to install and setup a CI plugin, as authentications are stored as secrets within the CI Tool. Please refer to the authentication documentation for creating/obtaining an authentication token.

Supported CI Tools

CI Plugins

TIOBE provides CI plugins to ease the use of TiCS. The plugins expose the TiCS analysis and Quality Gating features. CI plugins can be obtained from the CI vendor's marketplace. The following CI tools are supported:

TICSQServer:

• Azure DevOps (Team Foundation Server)
• Bamboo
• Jenkins

TiCS Client:

• Github action for pull requests

For specific details on a plugin, please refer to the corresponding CI plugin documentation, via the links above.

No plugin available for your CI

If you have a CI tool for which no TiCS plugin is available, it is still possible to integrate TiCS in your environment. To achieve this, you can follow the following recipe:

Install TiCS

Especially for nodes or agents that are created on demand, it is required to install TiCS programmatically. To install TiCS, the "Install TICS Script" can be used. This script can be found in your TICS Viewer by first navigating to "Administration Pages" in the menu in the top bar and then clicking "Install TICS".

Execute TiCS Analyzer

Supply the following command, updated with your applicable values:

• For TICSQServer:
  TICSQServer -project MYPROJECT -calc METRICS -branchdir BRANCHDIR
• For TiCS Client:
  TICS -project MYPROJECT -calc METRICS ANALYSISSET

Where:

• METRICS denotes a comma-separated string of metrics, for instance: BEGIN,CS,CW,END
  Please refer to the following pages about supported metrics for TiCS Client and TICSQServer
• MYPROJECT denotes the project name
• BRANCHDIR denotes a directory pointing to the root of your code base
• ANALYSISSET denotes a source file, directory or file containing a filelist.

See the command-line reference for all options of TICSQServer or TiCS Client.

Quality Gating

Make sure that a quality gate is defined. To do this, please refer to the section Quality Gates. Quality gates can be configured to apply to TICSQServer, TiCS Client or both.

Once a quality gate is defined for TICSQServer, it will be applied automatically. You can inspect the outcome of the quality gate in the TiCS viewer after a TICSQServer analysis is complete. To access the quality gate status programmatically, you can use the Quality Gate status API.

When a quality gate is defined for TiCS Client, -calc GATE must be supplied as pseudo metric to the TICS command to activate the quality gating feature. In this case all metrics, specified in the quality gate are run. To make the analysis fail if your quality gates are not met, -exitsqa must be supplied as argument as well. See Running TICS with GATE for detailed information.