Forrester: - Making Leaders Successful Every Day

Most development shops understand that the cost of repairing a defect increases exponentially as the application proceeds through the life cycle. But fewer shops know what they can do to identify defects early on. To improve the quality of their code even before formal testing begins, developers can perform unit testing, static analysis, performance analysis, and security testing. Full-featured integrated development environments (IDEs) include much — but not all — of the functionality that developers will need to accomplish these tasks. Shops using such IDEs will need to perform a careful inventory of their current tool sets before adopting additional code quality tools. To get the features they need, they may have to accept some degree of feature redundancy. The situation is different for developers working in Eclipse, who have both the freedom and the obligation to select their own code quality plug-ins.