From time to time I develop something on Eclipse. Apart from the usual Eclipse operations (build and test) that I do with the Eclipse Ant and JUnit plugins (they ship with Eclipse for Java), I also wanted to carry out some dependency analysis on existing code. Of course JDepend is the obvious option, but I found a nice article from IBM that suggests some additional plugins that help the coder carry out day to day tasks such as Complexity monitoring and Coding standard analysis.
The following is a summary of the plugins proposed by the article. Of course all of them are opensource/free.
| Tool | Purpose | URL for Eclipse plugin |
| CheckStyle | Coding standard analysis | http://eclipse-cs.sourceforge.net/update/ |
| Coverlipse | Test code coverage | http://coverlipse.sf.net/update |
| CPD | Copy/Paste detection | http://pmd.sourceforge.net/eclipse/ |
| JDepend | Package dependency analysis | http://andrei.gmxhome.de/eclipse/ |
| Metrics | Complexity monitoring | http://metrics.sourceforge.net/update |
The full IBM article can be found here: http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/java/library/j-ap01117/
Tags: eclipse, java, software development
