Code Quality Tools in Java

there are several tools to measure the code quality. the ones i have tried with a lot of success are:

• findbugs (latest version 1.3.8) – uses static analysis to look for bugs in java code . this is a great tool, it discovered possible nullpointerexceptions and a lot more bugs in my projects. sometimes i asked myself how this program could have discovered this ‘complicated’ bug. with the maven plugin you can do:

  mvn findbugs:findbugs

  which will use version 1.3.8 out of the box

• pmd (latest version 4.2.5) – scans java source code and looks for potential problems . the rules are configurable, but at the beginning you will only need the provided one (and spend a lot of time to choose your favourites )in netbeans 6.5 this tool is well integrated and works like a charme (ctrl+alt+p).

  with the maven plugin you can do:

  mvn pmd:pmd

  after you specified the following in the pom.xml under<reporting> <plugins> :

  <plugin>
    <groupid>org.apache.maven.plugins</groupid>
    <artifactid>maven-pmd-plugin</artifactid>
    <version>2.3</version>
    <configuration>
      <targetjdk>1.5</targetjdk>
    </configuration>
   </plugin>

other tools could be

• jaranalyzer – is a dependency management utility for jar files. it’s primary purpose is to traverse through a directory, parse each of the jar files in that directory, and identify the dependencies between the jar files.
• hammurapi – a code quality governance platform

but i haven’t tried them so far.

for findbugs  and pmd there is a netbeans plugin ( sqe … software quality environment ) which looks promising, but fails with a nullpointerexception after i installed it via the update center and tried it on my project. maybe i should use one of the snapshots . (btw: i successfully used the pmd-plugin and findbugs in the standalone version).

sonar is another interesting approach to use several code quality tools at a time. with sonar it is possible to see the violations or possible bugs over das or weeks  – so, you are looking at the improvements and you will not get lost in the mass of bugs at the beginning. another “multi-tooling” project is xradar .

a little bit offtopic, but a great tool is proguard, which shrinks, optimizes, obfuscates and preverifies java class files. there is even a maven plugin for that.

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