Earlier this week on Javalobby, I posted an extract from our monthly newsletter regarding our analysis of the ‘missing braces in If Statement’ rule firing and the potential bug involved.If you omit braces and use Static Analysis tools it is a problem actually finding these bugs. Why? Because you probably have the rule turned off!Having any tool tell you of violations in your code purely due to a stylistic preference will result in thousands of false positives and eventually demotivate the developer from using the tool, therefore, for the other good causes these tools promote, in this case it is probably better to switch the rule off.Hopefully Unit Tests are in place to cover these areas if static analysis is not used. The only other way to find these bugs is manual code review (laborious, time consuming and introduces human error i.e. the bug may be missed anyway) or debugger tracing.Another interesting aspect about the post was the comments. Many of those who omit braces in If Statements do so for readability purposes. Psychologically, this may mean that these developers see readability as a higher aspect of quality than possible fault-prone code. I’m not stating that readability is not important, far from it. However from a business perspective, having the code released with less faults is a higher quality perspective.