findbugs is an open source static code analysis tool

For example, when you test a program, you are performing dynamic program analysis, where you check if the program leaks memory, or fails with a null-pointer access exception. This can be performed dynamically, i.e., by actually executing the program and gathering facts. For each technique, I will also mention widely adopted (open source or commercial) tools that use the specific technology and highlight the possibilities of implementing your own static analysers (i.e., ideas for your six-month academic project).Īnalysing programs to gather facts on them is known as program analysis. In this column, I will first provide a detailed overview of static analysers and then delve into the different analysis techniques, many of which are formal, i.e., applied mathematics for modelling and analysing computer systems (hardware or software). To answer these questions, we need to understand the technology behind static analysers. Have you ever wondered how static analysers magically detect difficult-to-find bugs in code? And why some commercial static analysers are extremely costly? Have you ever thought how difficult (or how easy) it would be to write your own static analyser? We can see a summary of the test coverage where it displays how much code is covered under unit tests in class level and package levels: 3.2.There are a wide range of static analysers available today - both commercial as well as open source.

Finally, line 9 is highlighted with a red color, which means that this line is not tested at all by our unit tests. Therefore it's not completely tested and marked in yellow.įurthermore, line 7 has green color – it means that it is fully tested. Only one branch of the ‘if' condition is tested and runs in our simple test. In this case, we can see that line 6 is colored in yellow. In our test case, we're only testing out the scenario where the second parameter is zero: If the second parameter is zero it will return a max value for the integer data type. Our method is dividing two provided integer parameters and return the result. The Eclipse plugin uses different color schemes to pinpoint what portion of the code is covered by the test cases and what is not covered: The tool can be executed from project level to individual method level. An install link is also hosted on the official site available here. JaCoCo can be directly installed from the marketplace.

Findbugs is an open source static code analysis tool