Runing findbugs

[Jonathan Gibbons]

Kelly,

There are two ways to use findbugs.  It would be good to have a batch  
run of findbugs per build with the goal of publishing metrics.    
Separately, developers should be encouraged to run findbugs however  
works best for them, to get their findbug count down.

-- Jon

On May 13, 2008, at 5:39 PM, Kelly O'Hair wrote:

>
>
> David Herron wrote:
>> As the Quality group lead - I would be happy to have more quality  
>> metrics like findbugs results to publish on the site.  If we did  
>> publish those results I'd want to tie it to an effort to find  
>> community members to reduce the number of findbugs warnings.  And,  
>> um, it would be nice to have a parallel community effort to reduce  
>> the number of compiler warnings ;-)
>> Another thing which would be useful is support for easily running a  
>> comparison of findbugs results between two builds.  One way this  
>> could be used is to screen submissions of new code.. you'd have  
>> findbugs results for the trunk, and you'd have findbugs results for  
>> an individuals workspace, and you could compare them and see if the  
>> developer is introducing new warnings and/or removing warnings.
>> But .. ah.. a 12 hr time to generate a set of findbugs results  
>> doesn't sound scalable for this purpose..?  Asking RE to produce  
>> findbugs results for each promoted build might help but would that  
>> skew their machine resource requirements?
>> Kelly, you asked about having findbugs as a build requirement.  I  
>> think it's not fitting as a hard build requirement.  But I do think  
>> there should be a findbugs build target and having findbugs in your  
>> environment would be a requirement for that target but otherwise  
>> not required.
>
> But using the findbugs GUI or findbugs plugins (NetBeans/Eclipse)
> is a much better user experience than the command line.
>
> The textual output of findbugs is not something that is easy to
> understand and connect up to the source, the html output is better
> with the links and better source information.
> The findbugs errors are usually a bit more complicated than your
> typical javac error, not exactly sure how to describe it.
>
> It's the GUI interfaces and the IDE's in particular that seem to
> be the best findbugs analysis experience, in my opinion.
>
> -kto
>
>> - David Herron
>> Jonathan Gibbons wrote:
>>> Kelly,
>>>
>>> I think that running findbugs on different segments of JDK and  
>>> publishing histograms of the results on the OpenJDK Quality pages  
>>> would be a fine idea, but unless we can get engineers to sign up  
>>> to reducing bugs found by findbugs, the histograms would be  
>>> somewhat boring.
>>>
>>> -- Jon
>>>
>>>
>>> On May 13, 2008, at 4:37 PM, Kelly O'Hair wrote:
>>>
>>>>
>>>> I'm currently looking at how we could possible include a run of  
>>>> findbugs
>>>> in the build process, but my conclusion right now is that we  
>>>> cannot do it
>>>> by default, it takes way to long to run findbugs over everything.  
>>>> (>12hrs).
>>>>
>>>> But I could add some minor support to the Makefiles to allow  
>>>> someone to
>>>> run findbugs on specific classes/packages, using a command line  
>>>> like this:
>>>>
>>>> findbugs -textui -maxHeap 1024 -javahome /YOUR/jdk1.6.0 - 
>>>> sortByClass \
>>>>          -onlyAnalyze "IMPORT_SPEC" -html -output report.html \
>>>>          CLASSES_DIRECTORY_OR_JAR
>>>>
>>>> For example, after I have built the jdk, you could run findbugs  
>>>> over just
>>>> the java.lang.* classes:
>>>>
>>>> findbugs -textui -maxHeap 1024 -javahome /opt/java/jdk1.6.0 - 
>>>> sortByClass \
>>>>          -onlyAnalyze "java.lang.*" -html -output report.html \
>>>>           build/solaris-i586/classes
>>>>
>>>> Ideally you want a fully populated classes directory or jar file so
>>>> that it can analyze all the classes properly.
>>>> (Note: using java.lang.* does not include the classes in the  
>>>> nested packages).
>>>>
>>>> But people could just run the findbugs GUI and do the same thing,  
>>>> or better
>>>> yet, run the findbugs modules in the NetBeans IDE or Eclipse IDE.
>>>>
>>>> So I'm at a loss as to whether I should include anything in the  
>>>> makefiles
>>>> for this at all. Maybe I was premature in adding findbugs as a  
>>>> build dependence
>>>> on the jdk and it should just be removed?
>>>>
>>>> Any ideas out there? Or comments?
>>>>
>>>> -kto
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>