On the Use of Context in Recommending Exception Handling Code Examples

Abstract

Studies show that software developers often either misuse exception handling features or use them inefficiently, and such a practice may lead an undergoing software project to a fragile, insecure and non-robust application system. In this paper, we propose a context-aware code recommendation approach that recommends exception handling code examples from a number of popular open source code repositories hosted at GitHub. It collects the code examples exploiting GitHub code search API, and then analyzes, filters and ranks them against the code under development in the IDE by leveraging not only the structural (i.e., graph-based) and lexical features but also the heuristic quality measures of exception handlers in the examples. Experiments with 4,400 code examples and 65 exception handling scenarios as well as comparisons with four existing approaches show that the proposed approach is highly promising.

Enhancing Code Readability through Automated Consistent Formatting

“…Source code readability is important in efficient software development as it is considered a pillar aspect of maintainability and reusability. Readability, defined as the ease with which code can be understood by humans, plays a vital role in software engineering [10]. It is underlined that readability is essential not only during the development phase, but also during maintenance, as understanding the code is the first step in ensuring effective maintenance [11].…”