Comparing Bug Finding Tools for Java Open Source Software

Abstract Software’s are getting bigger and more complex and it is very important to improve defect-detection techniques. Software failure may have very critical consequences like economic loss. Using bug finding tools can reduce time and cost of testing software’s. The importance of software testing process has caused developing of many tools to find bugs automatically in program source code in recent years. In this paper, we perform a comparison between different Java open source bug-finding tools over a wide variety of tasks. For our study, we used three well-known open source bug-finding tools which are PMD, FindBugs and Checkstyle. We ran these tools on a variety of open source Java programs and compare the results. Our results show that each of the tools can find different kind of bugs and there is no perfect tool that can be used instead of the other tools.Editor: H. Kemal İlter, Ankara Yıldırım Beyazıt University, TurkeyReceived: August 19, 2018, Accepted: October 18, 2018, Published: November 10, 2018 Copyright: © 2018 IMISC Yıldırım, Bayraktaroğlu. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.