An Exploratory Study of Exception Handling Behavior in Evolving Android and Java Applications

Oliveira, Juliana; Cacho, Nélio; Borges, Deise; Silva, Thaisa; Castor, Fernando

doi:10.1145/2973839.2973843

Cited by 13 publications

(5 citation statements)

References 38 publications

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“…Three papers and the thesis of Pádua et al [15], [16], [17], [18] cite our article when discussing the importance of exception handling code. 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].…”

Section: Impactsmentioning

confidence: 88%

A Reflection on “An Exploratory Study on Exception Handling Bugs in Java Programs”

Ebert

Castor

Serebrenik

2020

2020 IEEE 27th International Conference on Software Analysis, Evolution and Reengineering (SANER)

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Section: Impactsmentioning

confidence: 88%

A Reflection on “An Exploratory Study on Exception Handling Bugs in Java Programs”

Ebert

Castor

Serebrenik

2020

2020 IEEE 27th International Conference on Software Analysis, Evolution and Reengineering (SANER)

Self Cite

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“…Those information were necessary to understand the development of the portion of code destined for exceptional flows [36] and which changes impact the exception handling [8]. In addition, there was investigated how the exceptional interfaces evolve [42], whether the developers use more customised exceptions as they acquire more knowledge about the project [41], and how normal and exceptional code changes are related to exception handling failures in Java, C# e Android applications [4,44]. We noticed that the hybrid researches, which investigate both human and technical aspects regarding EH, produce a better comprehension of the investigated phenomena and bring results that are more powerful and better justified than those that adopt only one strategy.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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

et al. 2020

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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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“…We choose Soot for the following reasons: first, Soot is a wellknown static analysis tool used in studies [8,12,24]; second, Soot's soundness and precision has been evaluated by researchers [47]; third, Soot can be easily used to analyze a Java program, by receiving only the application's .jar file as input; finally, the produced output can be easily used in exception flow analysis [12,24,40]. In Catcher, we use Soot to produce an annotated global call graph where we track the propagated exceptions from the api to the client.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Effective and efficient API misuse detection via exception propagation and search-based testing

Kechagia

Devroey

Panichella

et al. 2019

Proceedings of the 28th ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on Software Testing and Analysis

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Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) typically come with (implicit) usage constraints. The violations of these constraints (API misuses) can lead to software crashes. Even though there are several tools that can detect API misuses, most of them suffer from a very high rate of false positives. We introduce Catcher, a novel API misuse detection approach that combines static exception propagation analysis with automatic search-based test case generation to effectively and efficiently pinpoint crash-prone API misuses in client applications. We validate Catcher against 21 Java applications, targeting misuses of the Java platform's API. Our results indicate that Catcher is able to generate test cases that uncover 243 (unique) API misuses that result in crashes. Our empirical evaluation shows that Catcher can detect a large number of misuses (77 cases) that would remain undetected by the traditional coverage-based test case generator EvoSuite. Additionally, Catcher is on average eight times faster than EvoSuite in generating test cases for the identified misuses. Finally, we find that the majority of the exceptions triggered by Catcher are unexpected to developers i.e., not only unhandled in the source code but also not listed in the documentation of the client applications. CCS CONCEPTS • Software and its engineering → Software libraries and repositories; Error handling and recovery; Software testing and debugging; Search-based software engineering.

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An Exploratory Study of Exception Handling Behavior in Evolving Android and Java Applications

Cited by 13 publications

References 38 publications

A Reflection on “An Exploratory Study on Exception Handling Bugs in Java Programs”

A Reflection on “An Exploratory Study on Exception Handling Bugs in Java Programs”

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

Effective and efficient API misuse detection via exception propagation and search-based testing

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