100 Java Mistakes and How to Avoid Them

1 Managing code quality

This chapter covers

• Various techniques to improve the quality of your code
• Advantages and disadvantages of static analysis
• Approaches to make static analysis more useful
• Testing and assertions

Every software developer introduces bugs to the code—there’s no way to avoid them completely. Some bugs cause very subtle changes to a program’s behavior no user would reasonably care about. However, other bugs are much more severe and, depending on the project, could lead to millions of dollars in loss, a destroyed spacecraft, or even the loss of human lives. Most bugs fall somewhere in the middle: they don’t have disastrous effects, but they annoy users and require hours of debugging and fixing.

Some bugs are caused ...