Thanks, I'm pretty proud of it myself. As for adding anything to the discussion here, I'm not sure there's much to add. The people who have used static analysis tools understand their value without being harangued, and those who haven't don't understand how valuable they can be (particularly with editor-level integration). The wierd thing with discussions like these is how mistaken people are about just how common various sorts of bugs are. People remember the complicated race conditions and deadlock bugs they fought, but in practice the vast majority of non-business bugs are shallow and local, often little more than single-line typos, and easily detectable by simple pattern matchers or dataflow engines.
One additional thing to say is that with appropriate integration, static analysis can work over a lot more than what we traditionally think of as "source". The inspections in IDEA cover not just Java, but XML, HTML, CSS, and property files. There is also a commercial extension to IDEA, Inspection-JS that provides inspections over JavaScript. Every file in your project should have an extra pair of eyes looking it over.
As the guy who developed most of the bug detectors in IntelliJ, I can answer that. The first releases of FindBugs came slightly before IDEA added its InspectionAPI. Since then, I've used FindBugs as a source of bug-finding ideas, as well as PMD, Parasoft's JTest, and some other static analysis tools. I don't know if FindBugs has similarly cross-polinated back some of IDEAs detectors, but wouldn't be too surprised if it had.
Slashdot Mirror
Nice one! I'll be adding it to IntelliJ IDEA on the train to work this morning.
Thanks, I'm pretty proud of it myself. As for adding anything to the discussion here, I'm not sure there's much to add. The people who have used static analysis tools understand their value without being harangued, and those who haven't don't understand how valuable they can be (particularly with editor-level integration). The wierd thing with discussions like these is how mistaken people are about just how common various sorts of bugs are. People remember the complicated race conditions and deadlock bugs they fought, but in practice the vast majority of non-business bugs are shallow and local, often little more than single-line typos, and easily detectable by simple pattern matchers or dataflow engines.
One additional thing to say is that with appropriate integration, static analysis can work over a lot more than what we traditionally think of as "source". The inspections in IDEA cover not just Java, but XML, HTML, CSS, and property files. There is also a commercial extension to IDEA, Inspection-JS that provides inspections over JavaScript. Every file in your project should have an extra pair of eyes looking it over.
As the guy who developed most of the bug detectors in IntelliJ, I can answer that. The first releases of FindBugs came slightly before IDEA added its InspectionAPI. Since then, I've used FindBugs as a source of bug-finding ideas, as well as PMD, Parasoft's JTest, and some other static analysis tools. I don't know if FindBugs has similarly cross-polinated back some of IDEAs detectors, but wouldn't be too surprised if it had.