Reviews and Ratings
This plugin is easy to install, configure and use. After launching JUnit tests with coverage, you can see coverage results directly in the Eclipse editor.
The tool is very handy for quick and easy test coverage check.
A must for everyone writing JUnit tests.
I've written the plugin during a long and boring refactoring of a huge monolitic legacy Java project.
I had to run JDepend analysis by hand, compare results with expectations, try to find and understand cyclic dependencies between packages. After a day I found that my productivity was very low, so I've quickly hacked a wrapper for JDepend to run it inside Eclipse.
Since then, analysing the cyclic dependencies works in few seconds: select packages to check in package explorer, right click and run jDepend on it. It is very fast (thanks to JDepend), so that results are shown in the Eclipse in few seconds.
You use JUnit to test your code? You perform code reviews?
If yes, then here is the tool which will find test failures and review issues even before you build your application - just as you type. If not, here is the tool which (in few minutes) will give you the proof, that your code is not worth to be deployed at all, and a good reason to start testing your application and to review your code.
FindBugs works similar to the Java compiler: as soon as you hit CTRL+S, Eclipse will compile the code and start incremental bug analysis. FindBugs can find an amazing number of different bug patterns, which are sometimes hard to debug or to reproduce. FindBugs has a very small number of false positives. Even if you think that the code will never run in the highlighted issue, in many cases the tool open your eyes on "dirty" places in your code.
FindBugs is valuable for both beginner and experienced programmers. If you just start to write Java applications, the tool will help you to learn better programming practices by explaining you the reasons why the code should be written in a different way. FindBugs helps experienced developers to keep the code clean and to review other's code by simply running the analysis over the Java projects.
FindBugs uses unique bytecode scanning techniques to analyze compiled Java code. In most cases the critical and medium severity bugs found by FindBugs are real, serious programming errors, and not just coding style issues. This is the main differentiator to other similar tools like PMD and Checkstyle (both are source-code analyzer).
I cannot imagine to seriously develop Java software without FindBugs Eclipse plugin anymore. For those who knows Ant and Hudson: of course, they also have plugins for FindBugs, so that you can use same tool as in your IDE to analyze your software during automated tests.