Automated QA vs. manual QA

Overview

My task is to get used to various tools which is helpful in software development. Those tools include Ant, FindBugs, Checkstyle, and PMD. Then I need to think about pro and cons of automated QA and manual QA.

Checkstyle

I got 382 errors on my CodeRuler project, but errors from MyRuler.java are 17 and rest of them is from IBM. It says that MyRuler.java misses some Javadoc comments, and '}' should be alone, and we should use "{}", and so on. Most errors for IBM are about using tab character. Reviewer of my code also found those errors, but it would be fast if we use checkstyle. I think some of them can be fixed easily by using format feature of Eclipse.

PMD

There was 11 violations, and some of them says "avoid if(x != y)...; else...;" or "Avoid using if... else statement without using curly braces." Reviewer of my code also indicated those errors.

FindBugs

There was 1 warning, which was saying "Method MyRuler.initialize() uses the same code for two branches." Reviewer of my code did not indicate this. To check the content, it might be better to use this tool.

Conclusion

In terms of quality assurance, automated QA will be faster and more accurate than manual QA. However if we need to think about the logic of the program, we will need to think about it manually.