Unveiling Exception Handling Bug Hazards in Android Based on GitHub and Google Code Issues

Abstract

Abstract-This paper reports on a study mining the exception stack traces included in 159,048 issues reported on Android projects hosted in GitHub (482 projects) and Google Code (157 projects). The goal of this study is to investigate whether stack trace information can reveal bug hazards related to exception handling code that may lead to a decrease in application robustness. Overall 6,005 exception stack traces were extracted, and subjected to source code and bytecode analysis. The outcomes of this study include the identification of the following bug hazards: (i) unexpected cross-type exception wrappings (for instance, trying to handle an instance of OutOfMemoryError "hidden" in a checked exception) which can make the exceptionrelated code more complex and negatively impact the application robustness; (ii) undocumented runtime exceptions thrown by both the Android platform and third party libraries; and (iii) undocumented checked exceptions thrown by the Android Platform. Such undocumented exceptions make difficult, and most of the times infeasible for the client code to protect against "unforeseen" situations that may happen while calling third-party code. This study provides further insights on such bug hazards and the robustness threats they impose to Android apps as well as to other systems based on the Java exception model.

Search-Based Crash Reproduction and Its Impact on Debugging

“…For example, Yuan et al [84] reported that only 10% of the failures in distributed dataintensive systems are due to multi-threaded inter-leavings. A later study by Coelho et al [25] further reported that a large majority of failures in android apps are related to errors in programming logic and resource management, while concurrency accounts only for 2.9% of all failures.…”

Casting about in the dark: an empirical study of cast operations in Java programs

“…Several studies [Coelho et al 2015;Kechagia and Spinellis 2014;Zhitnitsky 2016] suggest that in Java, the ClassCastException is in the top ten of exceptions being thrown when analyzing stack traces. To illustrate the sort of problems developers have when applying casting conversions, we performed a search for commits and issues including the term ClassCastException within projects marked as using the Java language on GitHub.…”

Enabling mutation testing for Android apps

“…Return from back-end service not well formed [1] Special characters in HTTP post [1] Other [17] Back-end service not available/returns null [7] Error while invoking back-end service [10] Size-related [24] Miss check for IndexOutOfBoundException [14] Operation on empty string [1] Issues with collections size [1] Operations on empty collections [8] Other [10] ArrayStoreException [1] Missing implementation of comparable [3] Accessing TypedArray already recycled [1] Invalid operation on collection [4] Invalid string comparison in condition [1] UDP 53 bypass [1] SMTPSendFailedException (Authent. Failure) [1] Network connection is off/lost [6] Data loss in network operations [1] HTTP request issue [2] HttpClient usage [1] Network errors during authentication [1] Using infinite loop to check WIFI connection [1] Player crashes on slow connection [1] Network timeout [1] SipException (VoIP) [3] Missing checks [147] Missing null check [10] Null/Uninitialized object [40] Null Parameter [42] NullPointerException (general) [55] URI/URL [7] Error parsing URL in HTML website [1] Invalid URI used internally [4] Invalid URI provided by the user [ Cursor [7] Closing null/empty cursor [2] Issues when using DB cursors [5] Other [13] Database file cannot be opened [1] Bug in database access on SD card [1] Database locked [2] Wrong ...…”