Episode 12: Using FindBugs in Anger

Guest: Bill Pugh Host: Daniel Steinberg Bill Pugh, a computer science professor at the University of Maryland, is on a quest. As an academic, it is sometimes too easy to lose touch with the issues that face software developers in the trenches. He doesn't want to fall victim to this risk. Then again, folks who know Pugh's work would never suggest that he has. Pugh is the author of a program called FindBugs, a static analysis tool for detecting errors in Java programs. It has famously found several interesting bugs in the JDK standard libraries. This past, summer, Pugh worked at Google to help integrate FindBugs into its development environment and improve its code base. FindBugs is a great example of "accidental research"... Work on techniques for compressing Java class files produced utilities for doing static analysis of source code, which ultimately found a new application in detecting standard classes of errors that we programmers make in our code. You don't have to be Google to benefit from FindBugs or Pugh's expertise. Along with his colleague David Hovemeyer, he will teach a tutorial at ooPSLA titled Using FindBugs in Anger. In this tutorial, you'll learn how to incorporate FindBugs into your software development process, with an emphasis on solving issues that arise on projects with large code bases and multiple developers. Topics include differential analysis, for studying changes in the code base since the last build or release; persistent auditing; and annotations. In this podcast, Pugh joins Daniel Steinberg of DimSumThinking to chat about static analysis tools, his own FindBugs tool for Java, and how to use such tools most effectively in improving the quality of your code base.