Issues are detected automatically. 

Statuses

After creation, issues flow through a lifecycle, taking on one of five possible statuses:

• Open - set by SonarQube on new issues
• Confirmed - set manually to indicate that the issue is valid
• Resolved - set manually to indicate that the next analysis should Close the issue
• Reopened - set automatically by SonarQube when a Resolved issue hasn't actually been corrected
• Closed - set automatically by SonarQube for automatically created issues. 

Resolutions

Closed issues will have one of two resolutions:

• Fixed - set automatically when a subsequent analysis shows that the issue has been corrected
• Removed - set automatically when either the related coding rule or the file is no longer available. The rule may not be available either because it has been removed from the profile or because the underlying plugin has been uninstalled. The file could be unavailable because it has been removed from the project, moved to a different location or renamed.

Resolved issues will have one of two resolutions:

• False Positive - set manually
• Won't Fix - set manually

Issue workflow 

Issues are automatically closed (status: Closed) when:

• an issue (of any status) has been properly fixed => Resolution: Fixed
• an issue no longer exists because the related coding rule has been deactived or is no longer available (ie: plugin has been removed) => Resolution: Removed

Issues are automatically reopened (status: Reopened) when:

• an issue that was Resolved (but Resolution is not False positive) is shown by a subsequent analysis to still exist

Understanding which issues are "new"

To determine the creation date of an issue, during each analysis, the following algorithm is executed to determine if an issue is new or existed previously. For each issue, three of four criteria (rule; line number; line content or "hash"; and message) must match for a detected issue to be matched up with an existing one:

• on the same rule, with the same line number and with the same hash (but not necessarily with the same message) > MATCH
• on the same rule, with the same message and with the same hash (but not necessarily with the same line) > MATCH
• on the same rule, with the same message and with the same line number (but not necessarily with the same hash) > MATCH

In any other case, the issue is a new one.

Purging Closed Issues

By default, Closed issues are kept for 30 days. For more details, browse the Housekeeping documentation.