Question: Is it possible to detect unused methods in a source tree using FindBugs? I see some posts on SO where users are claiming to do that, some others asking how to do this in FB and others where they claim FB cannot do this. 

Does anyone know for sure how this is done? I am only interested in methods that are not explicitly called from elsewhere, I don't care about reflection.

Answer: 
as a member of the FindBugs team I can tell you that unfortunately FindBugs does **not** do this. If you search through the [bug patterns](http://findbugs.sourceforge.net/bugDescriptions.html) on our website, the only mentions of "unused" detectors is for unused *fields*.
I have a project i'm currently working on that does just this.... It's very early on tho, so probably a bunch of bugs left:

<https://github.com/mebigfatguy/deadmethods>