Developer notes

Zero tolerance to software failures, problems and security breaches.

In the last HJUG (Houston Java Users Group) meeting, Ching-Chiang Van who is a Senior Sales Engineer talked about Coverity, which is basically a portafolio of software integrity products to detect defects early in the development cycle.

Based on the demo and the capabilities of this software I can say that is much powerful than FindBugs and PMD together and well obviously it has a cost.

Van demoed some of the products that Coverity has:

The first one was Coverity Prevent, which automatically scans large, complex code at the earliest stage in the development cycle to detect critical and must fix defects.  Coverity Prevent has the lowest false positive rate (false positive is when you think that you have an error but in fact you don´t) and that´s good because you don´t waste time trying to fix those findings.

Then he talked about Coverity Thread Analyzer for Dynamic code analysis, hmm sounds powerful. The background on this one is that more and more companies develop multi-threaded Java apps on several servers so its a challenge to test these conditions and ensure quality. This tool is the first dynamic analysis solution for multi-threaded Java apps and helps to detect possible deadlocks and race conditions, avoid data corruption and system failures among others.

And there are other two products: Coverity Architecture Analyzer to visualize architectural structure, complexity and dependencies and Coverity Software Readiness Manager which provides objective information about code quality, code coverage, complexity and more.

You can try for free at their page.

Selenium (OpenQA) it is an incredible tool to do Web application testing. There is the IDE option, which is good to do some simple tests, I used it with FireFox, basically it records all the interaction between the browser and user, so it can help to do basic testing and helps to build more complex tests.

But here I will talk about how to test flash application with Selenium. It will consists of 3 simple steps:

1. You will need to download Selenium RC this is a more powerful part of Selenium, basically you will have a lot of options to write test automation, Java, PHP, Perl, etc. 
2. You will need to import the following into your Flash code “flash.external.ExternalInterface”. I would suggest that you create a special class file where you implement this (so you can move it a way when you release to production), since it can create a security hole in your app. You need to add call back to your class methods like the follwing “ExternalInterface.addCallback(“doSomething”, doSomething)”,  do this only with the methods you want to interact.
3. Once you have built the Flash code you will be able to call any function (that you have defined in Step 2) as those were Javascript. You will be able to call and return any object.

Maybe you have some doubts and this seems more complex than it is. Here it is a very good example of how to implement this.

See ya!!

Find Bugs is a free software (distributed under the terms of Lesser GNU Public License) to help developers to find potential bugs in the java code. 

You can get FindBugs here. There are several options to run it: GUI, ant task or Eclipse plugin.

FindBugs GUI – Steps:

1. Create Project. Add classes, jars or folder containing your java classes.
2. Running the Analysis. Click on Finish button to analyze the selected classes.
3. Verify the Results. You will get a list of potential bugs detected.
4. You can save/open the project.

What type of bugs you can find?

Probable bug, a bad practice or code that is confusing (dodgy).

Bugs descriptions:

Method might ignore exception.
Comparison of String parameter using == or !=
Class defines hashCode() and uses Object.equals()
Field names should start with a lower case letter
etc …

More useful information in the Manual.

Find Bugs has been used in a lot of projects, if you don´t, what are you wainting for: It´s free, you can have the Eclipse plug-in and run on demand or you can integrate it in your build.

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