PMD

I was reading something on slashdot and was given a link to PMD .

PMD is a static code analysis tool which scans Java code and looks for potiential problems including unused local variables, empty try and catch methods, copying and pasting of code and badly written code such as if statements with no braces. I ran it on a project I working on at work and surprise surprise (NOT) lots of the code had faults. Most of the faults where due to the bad style in which it was written i.e. returns in the middle of methods, unused variables, variables not declared correctly this again shows what bad code I'm dealing with and why their are so many bugs.

I have not yet configured PMD to run on my own set of rules which can be done. However as I'm using eclipse I discovered this tutorial which I found useful.