Go "Find Bugs" in your software.

Life was going smoothly for me last couple of weeks. Hardly anything to
do. So I started reading articles and blogs and I ended up on a blog on
The Serverside which mentioned about the tool called "Find Bugs" I found
the name very interesting and downloaded that tool. The very first thing
I did was that I ran it on the code base of software I was working on. I
found it funny that Find Bugs reported around 700 bugs. Obviously I had
at least some faith in my code which made me believe that it was just crap!

Next thing I did was I started looking at each issue individually and
read through the explanation on why that thing was reported as a Bug.
Suddenly it started making a lot of sense to me. Believe me, 80% of them
were bugs! It efficiently detected some blunders like empty catch blocks
with catch(Exeption e) Assignments to static in non static methods of
class, Dead local store, Class casting problems, Possible Null pointer
dereference etc. And at last I found some real work to do! A lot of
work! It taught me a lot about good coding.

Find Bugs is a must have tool in your swiss army knife for code review.
It takes off a lot of hassles of manual code reviews. It comes with a
Eclipse plugin too which works well but the swing front-end provided by
Find Bugs is really good. It lets you address problems by category.
Where as in Eclipse you have to go to individual source file to find out
bugs in your code. Eclipse also has summary view to see the problems but
it looks really cluttered. Its a must use tool for all Java programmers.