The Static Analysis Collector plugin that we installed in Chapter 4, Installing and Developing Hudson Plugins, provides the following plugins:
Checkstyle plugin
DRY plugin
FindBugs plugin
PMD plugin
Compiler Warnings plugin
Task Scanner plugin
Static code analysis can be performed on a source code that is not being executed. This analysis can be used to find coding errors and security bugs, as well as to verify that the source code is written following a specific style. Using the output of this analysis can help developers catch problems before the application is tested and can give some assurance that the specified coding standards are being followed.
PMD is a source code analyzer that will find common defects. It supports a number of languages including Java. PMD analysis will find bugs, if any, as well as suboptimal, overly complex, dead, or duplicate code. More information about PMD can be found at the project home page http://pmd.sourceforge.net/.