Improving developers awareness of the exception handling policy

Montenegro, Taiza; Melo, Hugo; Coelho, Roberta; Barbosa, Eiji Adachi

doi:10.1109/saner.2018.8330228

Cited by 11 publications

(7 citation statements)

References 20 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…Such tools provide a way of disseminating best practices during coding. The previously mentioned tools are general purpose tools; in the context of exception handling code, there are also a few specific Linters (e.g., Robusta [17], Exception Policy Expert [32]).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Hence, solutions aiming at automating the compliance checking of such guidelines (or part of them) and the code seem promising. Some work has been proposed in this direction [32]- [35]. However, in this work, the only guidelines that can be specified and automatically checked are the ones that can be expressed as: which elements should (or should not) throw and which elements should (our should not) catch exceptions.…”

Section: )mentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

Unveiling Exception Handling Guidelines Adopted by Java Developers

Melo

Coelho

2019

2019 IEEE 26th International Conference on Software Analysis, Evolution and Reengineering (SANER)

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Despite being an old language feature, Java exception handling code is one of the least understood parts of many systems. Several studies have analyzed the characteristics of exception handling code, trying to identify common practices or even link such practices to software bugs. Few works, however, have investigated exception handling issues from the point of view of developers. None of the works have focused on discovering exception handling guidelines adopted by current systemswhich are likely to be a driver of common practices. In this work, we conducted a qualitative study based on semi-structured interviews and a survey whose goal was to investigate the guidelines that are (or should be) followed by developers in their projects. Initially, we conducted semi-structured interviews with seven experienced developers, which were used to inform the design of a survey targeting a broader group of Java developers (i.e., a group of active Java developers from topstarred projects on GitHub). We emailed 863 developers and received 98 valid answers. The study shows that exception handling guidelines usually exist (70%) and are usually implicit and undocumented (54%). Our study identifies 48 exception handling guidelines related to seven different categories. We also investigated how such guidelines are disseminated to the project team and how compliance between code and guidelines is verified; we could observe that according to more than half of respondents the guidelines are both disseminated and verified through code inspection or code review. Our findings provide software development teams with a means to improve exception handling guidelines based on insights from the state of practice of 87 software projects.

show abstract

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: )mentioning

confidence: 99%

Unveiling Exception Handling Guidelines Adopted by Java Developers

Melo

Coelho

2019

2019 IEEE 26th International Conference on Software Analysis, Evolution and Reengineering (SANER)

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Exception handling recommendation has been studied in several researches [2,4,5,14,26,27,33]. Barbosa et al [4] proposed a set of three heuristic strategies used to recommend exception handling code.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Code recommendation for exception handling

Nguyen

2020

Proceedings of the 28th ACM Joint Meeting on European Software Engineering Conference and Symposium on the Foundations of Softw

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Exception handling is an effective mechanism to avoid unexpected runtime errors. However, novice programmers might fail to handle exceptions properly, causing serious errors like system crashing or resource leaking. In this paper, we introduce FuzzyCatch, a code recommendation tool for handling exceptions. Based on fuzzy logic, FuzzyCatch can predict if a runtime exception would occur in a given code snippet and recommend code to handle that exception. FuzzyCatch is implemented as a plugin for Android Studio. The empirical evaluation suggests that FuzzyCatch is highly effective. For example, it has top-1 accuracy of 77% on recommending what exception to catch in a try catch block and of 70% on recommending what method should be called when such an exception occurs. FuzzyCatch also achieves a high level of accuracy and outperforms baselines significantly on detecting and fixing real exception bugs. CCS CONCEPTS • Software and its engineering → Development frameworks and environments; Software libraries and repositories; Software maintenance tools.

show abstract

“…Similarly to our article, 19 different papers focus on bugs in the exception handling code [19], [20], [21], [22], [23], [24], [15], [25], [26], [27], [17], [14], [28], [18], [29], [30], [31], [32], [13]. Our categorization of exception handling bugs and their causes has been (partially) used in five different studies [20], [15], [26], [33], [18] The survey we conducted in our article also served as a basis for surveys by de Sousa [13], [34]. Finally, we found 15 papers addressing the five themes for future work that our paper discussed [23], [25], [26], [27], [35], [17], [36], [33], [29], [37], [30], [31], [32], [13], [38].…”

Section: Impactsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…This tool also provides project-specific recommendations and detects common bad exception handling practices. Montenegro et al [33] proposed an "exception policy expert" tool which alerts developers about policy violations and can suggest possible handlers for the exceptions. Nguyen et al [29] developed a tool to support developers by recommending code to catch an exception that is likely to occur in a code snippet.…”

Section: A Have Other Papers Followed Up?mentioning

confidence: 99%