Please list stages and tools for software automation

Question

We automate several aspects of Software development using tools. Want to understand

1. What tools the community recommends & why
2. Which stages of development have more potential for automation

To start things off, here are tools I use or know of.

1. Automated code quality checks: PMD
2. Regression Testing: Selenium & Molybdenum
3. Build: Hudson

Answer 1

1. checkstyle, Clover - I use it as Maven reporting plugins
2. Tellurium is slightly more advance the Selenium
3. TeamCity, LuntBuild -> depends on team which use this tools.

Answer 2

Let's start from the coding phase, some IDE's have code completion abilities as well as various degrees of refactoring options. These seem to me as some from of automation as well. Eclipse comes to mind, and Visual Studio combined with Resharper at the MS camp.