Exploring the FindBugs plugin

This section describes the configuration and usage of the FindBugs plugin.

FindBugs works with three types of errors. You can visit http://findbugs.sourceforge.net/bugDescriptions.html for the FindBugs error details. The following are the FindBugs-supported error categories and errors:

• Correctness bug: This is an apparent coding mistake that results in code that was probably not what the developer intended; for example, a method ignores the return value of a self-assigned field. The following are a few examples of a correctness bug:

  • The class defines tostring() but it should be toString()

  • A value is checked here to see whether it is null, but this value can't be null because it was previously dereferenced, and if it were null, a null pointer exception would have occurred at the earlier dereference

  • The method in the subclass doesn't override a similar method in a superclass because the type of a parameter doesn't exactly match the type of the corresponding parameter...