I listened to a recent Java Posse podcast yesterday and heard about the most interesting project. It is funny sometimes that I think I have a good handle on what is going on in the Java world and something like FindBugs slips under my radar.

FindBugs is a freely available software tool. It allows Java developers to run it against a code base and find bugs in thier code. It does this by searching for commonly found bug patterns. I have not tried it myself but it is my understanding that there have been 200,000 downloads of the application to date so I'm assuming it is in a state where it can be readily used. This creators of the application describe it quite well in the podcast and after hearing about it I'm going to check it out.