Regardless of the logging framework in use (logback, log4j, commons-logging, java.util.logging, ...), loggers should be: * private: never be accessible outside of its parent class. If another class needs to log something, it should instantiate its own logger. * static: not be dependent on an instance of a class (an object). When logging something, contextual information can of course be provided in the messages but the logger should be created at class level to prevent creating a logger along with each object. * final: be created once and only once per class. == Noncompliant Code Example With a default regular expression of LOG(?:GER)?: ---- public Logger logger = LoggerFactory.getLogger(Foo.class); // Noncompliant ---- == Compliant Solution ---- private static final Logger LOGGER = LoggerFactory.getLogger(Foo.class); ---- == Exceptions Variables of type org.apache.maven.plugin.logging.Log are ignored.