In this the last part of this four-part series I will zoom carefully into the ease of use of PMD. I totally enjoy PMD. The reason for this is the relative simplicity of writing your own bug pattern-capturing rules and using them under fire. More on that later. To round off we have included an in-depth interview with Tom Copeland, the author of PMD Applied and the newer JavaCC . It is no coincidence that Tom is at the center of the PMD development thrust.

Note: this is Part 4. Feel free to read Part 3!

In the previous posts, I have written about personal use of static code reviews via a GUI, in this case Eclipse. However, for large projects with hundreds of thousands of lines of code or more, with the code base being scattered amongst project teams, we have a problem. The economics of Quality Assurance demand a more mass analyzed and factory-efficient approach. Do things quick, hit the code, find the worst bugs and repair. The white box looking out, in combination with the functional or load testing black box methodologies looking in.

Note: this is Part 3. Feel free to read Part 2!

Finding bugs in your code can be quite nasty—especially if you don’t know where to look. However, finding bugs automatically does not require astronaut training. I think it’s time to leave that “pleasure” to free (as in freedom) automatic static code review tools like the ones reviewed in this series of articles.