Replacing Humans with Software Inspectors

An anonymous reader writes "What if you were able to perform a portion of your code reviews automatically? In this first article of the new series 'Automation for the People', development automation expert Paul Duvall begins with a look at automated inspectors like CheckStyle, JavaNCSS, and CPD. The piece examines how these tools enhance the development process and when you should use them." From the article: "Every time a team member commits modifications to a version control repository, the code has changed. But how did it change? Was the modified code the victim of a copy-and-paste job? Did the complexity increase? The only way to know is to run a software inspector at every check-in. Moreover, receiving feedback on each of the risks discussed thus far on a continuous basis is one sure-fire way to keep a code base's health in check automatically!"

Comments

CPD == copy/pasted code detector

[tcopeland]

If you've got a reasonably recent JVM installed you can run CPD via Java Web Start here.

There are some examples of CPD output there too - like the duplicate code chunks that it found in the JDK source code and in the Apache httpd source code.

For much more on CPD, see chapter 5!

How about FindBugs?

[iapetus]

These tools are very limited in their scope - FindBugs is a very useful and powerful tool for locating bugs or potential bugs in Java code, and I've used it to find some potentially serious bugs in large, relatively mature pieces of code before now. Using it to help find potential failures in newly modified pieces of code seems like a good idea.