“What if you were able to discover potential problems in your code prior to building it? Interestingly enough, there are Eclipse plugins for tools such as JDepend and CheckStyle that can help you discover problems before they are manifested in software. In this installment of Automation for the people, automation expert Paul Duvall provides examples of installing, configuring, and using these static analysis plugins in Eclipse so that you can prevent problems early in the development life cycle.”
FindBugs is a pretty good Eclipse plugin also…