Categorizing Faults in Exception Handling: A Study of Open Source Projects

Barbosa, Eiji Adachi; Garcia, Alessandro; Barbosa, Simone Diniz Junqueira

doi:10.1109/sbes.2014.19

“…Catch Generic, Generic Throws, Destructive Wrapping, and Catch and Do Nothing EH anti-patterns are responsible for the largest number of violations. Catch Generic EH anti-pattern corresponds to more than 70% of all found violations, unlike the results presented in other studies [12,15,19]. The interviewed architects pointed the absence of a team dedicated to software quality inspection in the institution, the high team turnover, the inexperience of developers to work with large systems, and the replication of anti-patterns as the source of this phenomenon.…”

Section: Introductioncontrasting

confidence: 75%

“…Barbosa et al [19] identify software failures caused by such kind of code anomalies. They named them as exception faults or exception handling faults, since they are related to defining, throwing, propagating, and documenting exceptions.…”

Section: Exception Handling Anti-patternsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Studying the evolution of exception handling anti-patterns in a long-lived large-scale project

Sousa

¹

,

Maia

²

,

Rocha

³

et al. 2020

J Braz Comput Soc

3

0

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Exception handling is a well-known technique used to improve software robustness. However, recent studies report that developers typically neglect exception handling (mostly novice ones). We believe the quality of exception handling code in a software project is directly affected (i) by the absence, or lack of awareness, of an explicit exception handling policy and guidelines and (ii) by a silent rising of exception handling anti-patterns. In this paper, we investigate this phenomenon in a case study of a long-lived large-scale Java Web system in a Public Education Institution, trying to better understand the relationship between (i) and (ii), and the impact of developers' turnover, skills, and guidance in (ii). Our case study takes into account the technical and human aspects. As a first step, we surveyed 21 developers regarding their perception of exception handling in the system's institution. Next, we analysed the evolution of exception handling anti-patterns across 15 releases of the target system. We conducted a semi-structured interview with three senior software engineers, representatives of the development team, to present partial results of the case and raise possible causes for the found problems. The interviewed professionals and a second analysis of the code identified the high team turnover as the source of this phenomenon, since the public procurement process for hiring new developers has mostly attracted novice ones. These findings suggest that the absence of an explicit exception handling policy impacts negatively in the developers' perception and implementation of exception handling. Furthermore, the absence of such policy has been leading developers to replicate existing anti-patterns and spread them through new features added during system evolution. We also observed that most developers have low skills regarding exception handling in general and low knowledge regarding the design and implementation of exception handling in the system. The system maintainer now has a diagnosis of the major causes of the quality problems in the exception handling code and was able to lead the required measures to repair this technical debt.

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“…Sinha et al [9] leveraged exception flow analyses to study the existence of 11 anti-patterns in four Java systems, without studying their prevalence. To understand the impact of anti-patterns, prior studies [2], [6], [5] classified exception-handling related bugs by mining software issue tracking. This paper is the first work to study the prevalence of exception handling anti-patterns extensively.…”

Section: B Empirical Studies On Exception Handlingmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…A prior study shows that two-thirds of the studied system crashes were due to exceptions [4]. Barbosa et al [5] illustrate the importance of the quality of exception handling code. Similar findings were also discussed in a prior survey [6].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 96%

Studying the Prevalence of Exception Handling Anti-Patterns

Pádua

¹

,

Shang

²

2017

2017 IEEE/ACM 25th International Conference on Program Comprehension (ICPC)

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Modern programming languages, such as Java and C#, typically provide features that handle exceptions. These features separate error-handling code from regular source code and are proven to enhance the practice of software reliability, comprehension, and maintenance. Having acknowledged the advantages of exception handling features, the misuse of them can still cause catastrophic software failures, such as application crash. Prior studies suggested anti-patterns of exception handling; while little knowledge was shared about the prevalence of these anti-patterns. In this paper, we investigate the prevalence of exception-handling anti-patterns. We collected a thorough list of exception anti-patterns from 16 open-source Java and C# libraries and applications using an automated exception flow analysis tool. We found that although exception handling antipatterns widely exist in all of our subjects, only a few antipatterns (e.g. Unhandled Exceptions, Catch Generic, Unreachable Handler, Over-catch, and Destructive Wrapping) can be commonly identified. On the other hand, we find that the prevalence of antipatterns illustrates differences between C# and Java. Our results call for further in-depth analyses on the exception handling practices across different languages.

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“…A large portion of systems has suffered from system crashes that were due to exceptions [6]. Additionally, the importance of exception handling source code has been illustrated in prior research and surveys [7], [8].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Revisiting Exception Handling Practices with Exception Flow Analysis

Pádua

¹

,

Shang

²

2017

2017 IEEE 17th International Working Conference on Source Code Analysis and Manipulation (SCAM)

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Modern programming languages, such as Java and C#, typically provide features that handle exceptions. These features separate error-handling code from regular source code and aim to assist in the practice of software comprehension and maintenance. Having acknowledged the advantages of exception handling features, their misuse can still cause reliability degradation or even catastrophic software failures. Prior studies on exception handling aim to understand the practices of exception handling in its different components, such as the origin of the exceptions and the handling code of the exceptions. Yet, the observed findings were scattered and diverse. In this paper, to complement prior research findings on exception handling, we study its features by enriching the knowledge of handling code with a flow analysis of exceptions. Our case study is conducted with over 10K exception handling blocks, and over 77K related exception flows from 16 open-source Java and C# (.NET) libraries and applications. Our case study results show that each try block has up to 12 possible potentially recoverable yet propagated exceptions. More importantly, 22% of the distinct possible exceptions can be traced back to multiple methods (average of 1.39 and max of 34). Such results highlight the additional challenge of composing quality exception handling code. To make it worse, we confirm that there is a lack of documentation of the possible exceptions and their sources. However, such critical information can be identified by exception flow analysis on welldocumented API calls (e.g., JRE and .NET documentation). Finally, we observe different strategies in exception handling code between Java and C#. Our findings highlight the opportunities of leveraging automated software analysis to assist in exception handling practices and signify the need of more further in-depth studies on exception handling practice.

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Categorizing Faults in Exception Handling: A Study of Open Source Projects

Cited by 21 publications

References 11 publications

Studying the evolution of exception handling anti-patterns in a long-lived large-scale project

Studying the evolution of exception handling anti-patterns in a long-lived large-scale project

Studying the Prevalence of Exception Handling Anti-Patterns

Revisiting Exception Handling Practices with Exception Flow Analysis

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