Coverity for Java static analysis

Question

I'd like to get comments from people who have used or evaluated Coverity for statically analysing Java-code. I know it's popular in C/C++ world, but is it worth spending the money for Java analysis or am I better off with PMD, Findbugs and other Open Source tools?

Answer 1

I'll chip in with a somewhat relevant answer. I've used Klocwork for the both Java and C code. Klocwork is a close competitor of Coverity... cost-wise they are about the same ( look carefully, Klocwork looks cheaper until you actually buy what you need ), and feature-wise they fight back and forth.

For C/C++, it's great. For Java.... well, it helped find a lot of resource leaks ( #$@^#ing Java developers seem to forget that resources like file handles aren't garbage collected ), but it doesn't seem to find many "critical" bugs. It's probably because the language itself does help protect against some of the more basic but hard to find errors ( array overflows, pointer corruption, etc ).

Get Coverity in to run a demo, they are more than happy to. See what sort of things they find.

Answer 2

If you aren't using anything today, I would start off with Findbugs and PMD. They are easy to install and use. Concentrate on reviewing and fixing correctness errors with Findbugs first - they recommend starting with High and Medium severity correctness errors as the checkers have very low false positives and you will get a good return on your time. Get developers to use PMD to cleanup the code, and the Findbugs plugin in Eclipse to review new code. Working incrementally will get the developers to understand and buy-in to the usefulness of these tools.

Coverity's Java checkers are still weak compared to their C/C++ checkers. We use Findbugs, PMD, Coverity and Klocwork because they all have different strengths and we are paranoid. If you aren't paranoid, you could stick with open source tools and get a lot of value. Or if you need security checking: then Klocwork or especially Fortify should do a more thorough job for you.

Answer 3

I'll add a limited me-too to the preceding answers, somewhat restricted by the Coverity NDA I'm bound by. Coverity Prevent has an impressive public track record for finding bugs in open source C/C++ code, but their Java product is a lot newer. (Coverity has a press release on my former employer, so I can say that it did help find and fix lots of bugs in our C/C++ code, more than I'd found in all my previous career in bug hunting.) FindBugs does an impressive job on Java code, and you can't beat the price. But the big point has already been made: try out both of them on your real code before you buy. There's no substitute for reality, and the conventional wisdom in static analysis is that there's surprisingly little overlap in what the tools discover.