3 Replies Latest reply on Oct 16, 2006 6:22 PM by genman

    Add "findbugs" target

    genman


      There's a fairly good static analysis program that finds common language errors, synchronization bugs and synchronization inconsistencies, etc. I have used it for my own projects and it works well. One problem with it, is that it tends to generate spurious warnings, although they claim very few.

      http://findbugs.sourceforge.net/

      Could this get integrated into a build target for a project. For example, along with "compile" there could be a "findbugs" target? I think it might be useful.

        • 1. Re: Add

          It looks interesting.

          Have you actually used it to find confirmed defects in projects you are involved in? In JBoss?

          IE, have you raised or seen raised an issue which was reported by this tool, and subsequently fixed by that project's dev team?

          These sorts of tools are helpful, but only if the project team trusts its output enough to write JUnit tests to confirm the problem. They are probably too busy fixing bugs users actually encounter or creating features users have actually requested :-)

          • 2. Re: Add
            genman


            Looks like they already ran their tool against JBoss 4.0.2:

            http://findbugs.sourceforge.net/demo.html

            Seems like mostly 3rd party stuff raises warnings.

            The tool integrates pretty readily with Maven:

            http://maven-plugins.sourceforge.net/maven-findbugs-plugin/

            • 3. Re: Add
              genman

              To answer your questions: I have used it in my projects and have used it to correct some (potential) synchronization bugs. I have found issues against other people's code.

              You can review the report yourself and decide on the quality of results.