Hi All,

I am wondering if anyone has any experience, can recommend, any open
source publicly licensed source code analysis and code coverage tools,
such as PMD, jester and jlint. I am definitely open to hearing about
any and all, so please do not limit your reply to just the
aforementioned tools.

For both source code analysis and code coverage tools, I am interested
in:
1) how well they seemed to work
2) how well they integrated with the ide (if intended to do so)
3) how well they integrated into build tools (ant, cruise control)
4) how easy it was to understand the reporting.
5) For the source code analysis, I am especially interested in anything
you say about the complexity measures performed.

I've found a few websites listing several such tools but don't have the
time to research them all. Here are the websites I found:
http://www.oneclipse.com/plugins/analysis-plugin-topic/topic_view
http://java-source.net/open-source/code-coverage
http://java-source.net/open-source/code-analyzers

As for my requirements, they are fairly nebulous. I have just joined a
team, fairly new itself, which has the mandate to improve application
performance and stability across the enterprise. I am concentrating
initially on the mid tier. We are installing a tool
called Introscope to monitor the applications. However, since I have
long had an interest in quality and process, it seems the best place to
make long term improvements is before application deployment. I also
feel that static source code analysis, especially complexity measures,
could be used to identify potential hot spots, spots that I could make
sure are probed via Introscope. Since I am part of the enterprise team
and we are rolling this out to other teams, I was hoping to demonstrate

such a tool to the application in areas in this capacity while
mentoring, then suggest that it be incorporated into eclipse and ant. I
was hoping they would see the benefit of source code analysis. I would
also, in the same breath, recommend code coverage tools and maybe even
beautifiers so that all the source code would have the same feel. Some
of this may have to wait for a second phase when we are concentrating
more on process rather than the current fires. My purpose in asking for
recommendations should be obvious.

This also brings up the larger topic of whether or not people find
complexity measures useful. It is my belief, and I only have anecdotal
information to support this, that complex code has a higher propensity
for failure. Don't we all believe this to be true?

Likewise, it seems that code coverage tools should be useful. Then
again, they could be overkill and may bring development to a crawl.

Any feedback that can be provided to short-circuit the testing of such
tools is truly appreciated!

TIA

bill