Code quality testing startup SonarSource Sàrl today introduced a major expansion of SonarQube that brings full software architecture management into its code quality and security platform for the first time.

The new capability helps development teams keep their code clean and prevents structural erosion that often occurs as systems evolve.

The issue the expansion is seeking to take on is one whereby maintaining large codebases, governing how components are organized and how they depend on each other can cause issues. Without managing that structure actively, architectural drift accumulates and can widen the gap between the intended design and the actual implementation.

Sonar says that architectural drift is one of the most severe and underestimated forms of technical debt because it gradually slows development and can result in a costly and risky rewrite.

The company argues that the problem of drift has also grown more urgent with the rise of large language model-powered coding assistants, which focus on solving the immediate task at hand but often have little awareness of architectural constraints. Added to the mix is AI-generated code that increases the risk of structural debt, making manual oversight impractical.

The new architecture capability released by Sonar today provides teams with tools to visualize their current structure, define their intended architecture and automatically detect gaps between the two.

SonarQube can now generate a live view of how components relate to each other and offers a clear map that developers and AI agents can use as context when writing new code. With the new functions, teams can then incrementally formalize the architecture they expect, starting with lightweight definitions and refining them over time.

The platform continuously analyzes code to highlight violations without duplicating issues across multiple layers, allowing teams to focus on the root problem instead of scattered symptoms. Architectural deviations are converted into actionable maintainability issues that flow into existing developer workflows, showing up in quality gates before they can compound into larger structural failures.

The new support also sees SonarQube tracking gaps and improvements over time to give organizations a measurable view of their architecture health. Sonar said that enables developers and AI agents to leverage the current architecture as context to write the right code and the intended architecture to write the code right. In turn, it added, that ensures the software remains modular and maintainable.

The new functions are now available in beta on SonarQube Cloud, with support for SonarQube Server planned for a future date.

Image: Sonar