I enjoyed the talk on Find Bugs at OOPSLA 2004. Find Bugs is a useful, practical and pragmatic tool produced by David Hovemeyer, Bill Pugh and others at the University of Maryland.
It is much like a style checker but with rules that find things that are probably bugs. It's a very pragmatic, and simple, approach. It is somewhat reminiscent of SmallLint (for Smalltalk). The bug patterns that Find Bugs looks for are based on bugs that the Find Bugs developers have found in real code. In their talk, they presented figures of using Find Bugs on the JDK1.5 code base - it identified many potential bugs.
I tried Find Bugs on one of my open source projects, Jester. Mostly, the things it found weren't things that worry me too much - it identified my sloppy coding where streams won't be closed if an exception is thrown, which I'll probably fix some time. What pleased me most was that it found a couple of fields that I can delete (not bugs), and I do love deleting code.
Posted by ivan at December 1, 2004 3:33 PM