Visualization of exception handling constructs to support program understanding

Shah, Hina; Görg, Carsten; Harrold, Mary Jean

doi:10.1145/1409720.1409724

Cited by 31 publications

(28 citation statements)

References 21 publications

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“…They also claimed that the global flow of exceptions and the emergence of unanticipated exceptions are the main causes of difficulties in designing exception structures. In order to assist programmers in designing and implementing exception handling, a visualisation tool has been suggested (Shah, Görg, & Harrold, 2008).…”

Section: Difficulties In Applying Exception Handlingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Students’ Strategies for Exception Handling

Rashkovits

Lavy

2011

JITE:Research

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Executive SummaryThis study discusses and presents various strategies employed by novice programmers concerning exception handling. The main contributions of this paper are as follows: we provide an analysis tool to measure the level of assimilation of exception handling mechanism; we present and analyse strategies to handle exceptions; we present and analyse solutions provided by novice programmers; we classify and analyse the participants' reflections concerning their solutions. Modern programming languages, such as Java, provide the programmer an elaborated object oriented exception mechanism; enable him to handle exceptions in a more convenient way. The aim of this study was to discover the strategies novice programmers are using to handle exceptions and whether they utilise the advantage of the modern exception handling mechanism. For that matter the participants (college students) had to provide a written solution to a given problem with a special focus on exception handling. In addition each of them was interviewed. The analysis of the solutions provided was carried out according to a set of software quality criteria (clarity, modularity and extensibility) adapted to exception handling characteristics. These criteria were used to explain the advantages and disadvantages of the solutions from a software engineering perspective. The solutions provided were also analysed according to a classification of levels of assimilation concerning the structure of exceptions, based on the SOLO taxonomy. The first level of assimilation refers to solutions in which no exception mechanism was used, and the errors were handled in the old fashion way (local handling or return of an error code). The fifth and last level refers to solutions that used adequate hierarchy of exception classes allowing easy extension according to future requirements and enabling the handling of multiple exception altogether or handle each separately. In between these levels there are strategies that used exception mechanisms without the exhausting of its advantages. The results obtained reveal that only few participants (7 out of 56) provided a solution that was classified to one of the two highest assimilation levels, while many (23 out of 56) did not use exception mechanism at all. The rest of the students (25 out of 56) used the exception mechanism poorly (i.e., used only Exception class or did not use hierarchy of exceptions). The participants had difficulties in utilising the advanced exception handling mechanisms and in exhibiting a high level of abstraction with regard to the proper design of a hierarchy of exceptions. The students' statements collected during the interviews were classified into the following categories: misconceptions concerning code quality; misconceptions concerning exception handling; difficulties in understanding the exception handling mechanism; the perceived importance of exception handling; and a lack of programming experience. During the interviews the students provided explanations concerning the reasons they wer...

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Section: Difficulties In Applying Exception Handlingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Students’ Strategies for Exception Handling

Rashkovits

Lavy

2011

JITE:Research

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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%

“…Many solutions supporting exception handling are aimed at visualizing how exceptions propagate through methods in the source code (CHANG et al, 2001,FU and RYDER, 2007,ROBILLARD and MURPHY, 1999,ROBIL-LARD and MURPHY, 2003,SHAH, GÖRG and HARROLD, 2008a. However, visualization-based solutions do not provide visual cues of where violations are located in the source code, nor assists in the comprehension of which modifications must be performed in the source code to repair the violations.…”

Section: Culty In Repairing Violationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In the context of exception handling, many solutions have been proposed to support the comprehension of exception handling code (CHANG et al, 2001, FU and RYDER, 2007, ROBILLARD and MURPHY, 1999, ROBILLARD and MURPHY, 2003, SHAH, GÖRG and HARROLD, 2008a. MURPHY, 1999, ROBIL-LARD andMURPHY, 2003) investigated the di culties that developers face when dealing with exceptions during software construction.…”

Section: Exception Handling Comprehensionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Following the same approach of these previous works, Shah et al (SHAH, GÖRG and HARROLD, 2008a) proposed a visualization tool named EN-HANCE -ExceptioN HANdling CEntric visualization. This tool provides three di↵erent views for the exception handling code implemented in Java programs.…”

Section: Exception Handling Comprehensionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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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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Research on error feedback mechanism of information system

Chen²,

Qian³

2011

2011 2nd International Conference on Artificial Intelligence, Management Science and Electronic Commerce (AIMSEC)

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Visualization of exception handling constructs to support program understanding

Cited by 31 publications

References 21 publications

Students’ Strategies for Exception Handling

Students’ Strategies for Exception Handling

Global-Aware Recommendations for Repairing Exception Handling Violations

Research on error feedback mechanism of information system

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