Automatic documentation inference for exceptions

Buse, Raymond P.L.; Weimer, Westley

doi:10.1145/1390630.1390664

Cited by 100 publications

(73 citation statements)

References 47 publications

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“…In most cases, such implicit exceptions are caused by programming errors, so it might be inappropriate to include them in the documentation [15]. Therefore, we adopt a similar strategy as in [16] and omit implicit exception extraction. For static analysis tools, we use Eclipse's JDT and CallHierarchy mainly due to their ability to parse programs with incomplete reference information.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Analyzing APIs Documentation and Code to Detect Directive Defects

Zhou

Chen

et al. 2017

2017 IEEE/ACM 39th International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE)

100

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Abstract-Application Programming Interface (API) documents represent one of the most important references for API users. However, it is frequently reported that the documentation is inconsistent with the source code and deviates from the API itself. Such inconsistencies in the documents inevitably confuse the API users hampering considerably their API comprehension and the quality of software built from such APIs. In this paper, we propose an automated approach to detect defects of API documents by leveraging techniques from program comprehension and natural language processing. Particularly, we focus on the directives of the API documents which are related to parameter constraints and exception throwing declarations. A first-order logic based constraint solver is employed to detect such defects based on the obtained analysis results. We evaluate our approach on parts of well documented JDK 1.8 APIs. Experiment results show that, out of around 2000 API usage constraints, our approach can detect 1146 defective document directives, with a precision rate of 81.6%, and a recall rate of 82.0%, which demonstrates its practical feasibility.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…For static analysis tools, we use Eclipse's JDT and CallHierarchy mainly due to their ability to parse programs with incomplete reference information. Some related work, such as [16], utilizes the Soot toolset [17], which requires complete type class references.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Analyzing APIs Documentation and Code to Detect Directive Defects

Zhou

Chen

et al. 2017

2017 IEEE/ACM 39th International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE)

100

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“…Recent work from Sridhara et al automatically synthesize natural language sentences for specific types of code segments directly, including Java methods [3], groups of statements [4], Java classes [5], and parameter comments [6]. Others focus on generating documents for exception [22], failed test cases [23], and code changes [24]. A few previous work focus on mining descriptions or documentation from developer communications, such as bug reports, forum posts and emails [25], [26], [27].…”

Section: A Automatic Comment Generationmentioning

confidence: 99%

CloCom: Mining existing source code for automatic comment generation

Wong

Liu

Tan

2015

2015 IEEE 22nd International Conference on Software Analysis, Evolution, and Reengineering (SANER)

136

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Abstract-Code comments are an integral part of software development. They improve program comprehension and software maintainability. The lack of code comments is a common problem in the software industry. Therefore, it is beneficial to generate code comments automatically. In this paper, we propose a general approach to generate code comments automatically by analyzing existing software repositories. We apply code clone detection techniques to discover similar code segments and use the comments from some code segments to describe the other similar code segments. We leverage natural language processing techniques to select relevant comment sentences.In our evaluation, we analyze 42 million lines of code from 1,005 open source projects from GitHub, and use them to generate 359 code comments for 21 Java projects. We manually evaluate the generated code comments and find that only 23.7% of the generated code comments are good. We report to the developers the good code comments, whose code segments do not have an existing code comment. Amongst the reported code comments, seven have been confirmed by the developers as good and committable to the software repository while the rest await for developers' confirmation. Although our approach can generate good and committable comments, we still have to improve the yield and accuracy of the proposed approach before it can be used in practice with full automation.

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“…At best, these policies are partially documented in API documentation or source code comments. Most of the times these policies are not documented and exist as implicit rules in the source code (BUSE andWEIMER, 2008, THUMMALAPENTA andXIE, 2009). In fact, the lack of explicit exception handling policies is considered one of the main reasons why developers struggle to implement exception handling (SHAH et al, 2010).…”

Section: Lack Of Explicit Exception Handling Policiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Developers participating in recent surveys reported that there exist exception handling policies in their systems, although not much e↵ort is spent in documenting them CASTOR, 2013,EBERT et al, 2015). Most of the times these policies are not documented and exist as implicit rules in the source code (BUSE andWEIMER, 2008, THUMMALAPENTA andXIE, 2009). In fact, in the study presented in Chapter 3, we observed that some faults occurred due to violations of implicit exception handling policies of the projects.…”

Section: Specifying and Verifying Exception Handling Policiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Global-Aware Recommendations for Repairing Exception Handling Violations

BARBOSA¹

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Exception handling is the most common way of dealing with exceptions in robust software development. Exception handling refers to the process of signaling exceptions upon the detection of runtime errors and taking actions to respond to their occurrence. Despite being aimed at improving software robustness, software systems are still implemented without relying on explicit exception handling policies. Each policy defines the design decisions governing how exception handling should be implemented in a system. These policies are often not documented and are only implicitly defined in the system design. Thus, developers tend to introduce in the source code violations of implicit policies and these violations commonly cause failures in software systems. In this context, the goal of this thesis is to support developers in detecting and repairing exception handling violations. To achieve this goal, two complementary solutions were proposed. The first solution is based on a domain-specific language supporting the detection of violations by explicitly defining exception handling policies to be enforced in the source code. The proposed language was evaluated with a user-centric study and a case study. With the observations and experiences gathered in the user-centric study, we identified some language characteristics that hindered its use and that motivated new language constructs. In addition, the results of the case study showed that violations and faults in exception handling share common causes. Therefore, violations can be used to detect potential causes of exceptionrelated failures. To complement the detection of exception handling violations, this work also proposed a solution for supporting the repair of exception handling violations. Repairing these violations requires reasoning about the global impact that exception handling changes might have in di↵erent parts of the system. Thus, this work proposed a recommender heuristic strategy that takes into account the global context of where violations occur to produce recommendations. Each recommendation produced consists of a sequence of modifications that serves as a detailed blueprint of how an exception handling violation can be removed from the source code. The proposed recommender strategy also takes advantage of explicit policy specifications, although their availability is not mandatory. The results of our empirical assessments revealed that the proposed recommender strategy produced recommendations able to Tratamento de exceçõesé o modo mais comum de lidar com erros no desenvolvimento de software robusto. Tratamento de exceções refere-se ao processo de sinalizar exceções quando erros em tempo de execução são detectados e de tomar ações para responderà ocorrência destas exceções. Apesar de objetivarem a melhoria da robustez de software, sistemas de software ainda são implementados sem se basear em uma política explícita para tratamento de exceções. Cada política define as decisões de projeto que governam como tratamento de exceções deve ser implementado num sis...

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Automatic documentation inference for exceptions

Cited by 100 publications

References 47 publications

Analyzing APIs Documentation and Code to Detect Directive Defects

Analyzing APIs Documentation and Code to Detect Directive Defects

CloCom: Mining existing source code for automatic comment generation

Global-Aware Recommendations for Repairing Exception Handling Violations

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