ChrisDolan

FindBugs is shockingly useful. I've run it on Java code that I thought was bulletproof only to reveal synchronization errors. It's found real bugs for me in Colletion.remove() where I mistakenly passed an instance of the wrong type so the remove is guaranteed to silently fail.

The Eclipse and Ant plugins make FindBugs an integral part of my development.

EMMA is a great code coverage tool. My favorite feature about it is that it works (via a wrapper plugin) with the Eclipse IDE. Otherwise, I've found Cobertura to be slightly more useful.

EMMA does not do detailed analysis on complex boolean conditionals. In that space, the best tool I've ever used is Devel::Cover for Perl, which provides red/green truth tables for all combinations of boolean inputs.

PMD is a useful static source code analyzer. As a developer for a similar tool for Perl, I'm quite familiar with the challenges of such a project.

At my organization, PMD is largely eclipsed by the closed-source tool, CodePro, which has a much larger set of policies and better IDE integration. But the two projects have some disjoint policy sets, so I find it useful to use both PMD and CodePro (plus FindBugs) on projects.

Every time I work on a new computer, I invariably try to run ack at some point and get annoyed that I have to fall back to 'egrep -r '' . | grep -v svn'. I hope that someday it's pre-installed everywhere.