Top FindBugs Alternatives

Bugs can be annoying, both for the users and developers! For users, they deteriorate the experience; for developers, they become a matter of annoyance, giving them a hard time to write quality codes. Searching for bugs is often humanly impossible in a program having thousands of lines of code. A tool like FindBugs comes handy in such times. It is an open-source static code analysis tool for detecting defects and potential errors in Java programs. It classifies suspicious codes into the ranks of scariest, scary, troubling, and of concern, thereby, helping developers understand the severity of the issue.

Scan for possible bugs in Java

FindBugs helps in the detection of any potential bug while working on the Java program. Currently available in 3.0.1. version, it is a free-to-use software. Its findings are reported as warnings, which can mean they are bugs or are probably simple performance issues. Either way, as stated above, it gets categorized into four types depending on its severity or possible impact. Currently, it is capable of reporting around 400 warnings in the categories of correctness (142), bad practice (84), dodgy code (71), multithreaded correctness (45), performance (27), malicious code vulnerability (15), security (11), experimental (3), and internationalization (2). 

Robust plugin integrations

You can execute FindBugs from builds, command lines, or SDEs. Several plugin integrations are available such as Maven, Eclipse, Hudson, Netbeans, and IntelliJ that help to generate static analysis reports. Once you configure the Maven plugin, the ‘mvn site’ command can be used for project documentation. In the Eclipse environment, you can also customize the warning filters from Filters File panel. Settings for configuration of IntelliJ IDEA are quite similar to Eclipse; after that, you can group bugs by category, rank, package, or class. While documentation is still improving, the warning descriptions are more detailed and concise in later versions.

Get the best out of the latest versions

In FindBugs, an average rate of false warnings is below 50%, which is a considerably good number. Even some real warnings cannot be fixed; therefore, warnings often need to be deactivated either by switching off the entire thing for all classes in the project file or by disabling single warnings in particular sections of the code. If need be, you can also create your own rules or add third-party detectors to FindBugs. Thus, you get a lot of flexibility in terms of usage, and with the latest versions being more potent than ever, FindBugs is a great place to start.