Top 40 Static Code Analysis Tools

In my personal experience, combining strongly-typed compiled languages with extensive static analysis has helped "eliminate" bugs at the syntax level, and to some extent at the semantic level. But the stuff that really causes issues is often at the level of the pragmatics of your software. (Going vaguely off the definitions here http://www.cs.sfu.ca/~cameron/Teaching/383/syn-sem-prag-meta... )

I think given the overwhelmingly large number of frameworks around, people tend to make snap judgments around how to use these tools (and the names of these tools don't help - "Findbugs" is a bit overkill :).

Make sure your software has a real set of designs before you start writing code (i.e. block, sequence, control/data flow diagrams and use-cases) and it'll be worth more than any static analysis tool, and it takes far less time. Static analysis can be layered in later if you have time.