Assessing the Impact of Aspects on Exception Flows: An Exploratory Study

Coelho, Roberta; Rashid, Awais; Garcia, Alessandro; Ferrari, Fabiano Cutigi; Cacho, Nélio; Kulesza, Uirá; Staa, Arndt von; Lucena, Carlos José Pereira de

doi:10.1007/978-3-540-70592-5_10

Cited by 61 publications

(101 citation statements)

References 25 publications

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“…For instance, programmers throw and catch generic exceptions, resulting in poor exception handling, leading to a decrease in software quality and dependability (Cabral & Marques, 2006;Coelho et al, 2008;Garcia, Rubira, Romanovsky & Xu, 2001). Advanced techniques such as "aspect-oriented programming" also exist, which further reduce the complexity of exception detection and handling and which can cut the code dedicated to exception detection and handling significantly (Lippert & Lopes, 2000).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

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: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Students’ Strategies for Exception Handling

Rashkovits

Lavy

2011

JITE:Research

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“…This example was chosen because it is easy to understand and illustrates recurring failures whose causes are located in the exception handling code. This example was also chosen because it illustrates commonly reported failures caused by global exceptions (CACHO et al, 2014a, CACHO et al, 2014b, COELHO et al, 2008. As one can observe in the diagram depicted in Figure 1.1, the structure of the Health Watcher system is separated into multiple tiers: GUI, Façade, Business and Persistence.…”

Section: Problem Statement and Limitations Of Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Global exceptions are those raised and handled in di↵erent methods of a program , CACHO et al, 2009,ROBILLARD and MURPHY, 1999,ROBILLARD and MURPHY, 2003. In fact, all failures reported in previous studies were caused by global exceptions (CACHO et al, 2014a,CACHO et al, 2014b,COELHO et al, 2008.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…However, despite being intended to improve software robustness, the causes of recurring failures in software systems are located in the exception handling code (CACHO et al, 2014a, CACHO et al, 2014b, COELHO et al, 2008,MARINESCU, 2011,MARINESCU, 2013,SAWADPONG et al, 2012. In particular, common failures are caused by global exceptions being left uncaught or being caught in the wrong place in the system (CACHO et al, 2014a, CACHO et al, 2014b,COELHO et al, 2008.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In particular, common failures are caused by global exceptions being left uncaught or being caught in the wrong place in the system (CACHO et al, 2014a, CACHO et al, 2014b,COELHO et al, 2008. Global exceptions are those raised and handled in di↵erent methods of a program , CACHO et al, 2009,ROBILLARD and MURPHY, 1999,ROBILLARD and MURPHY, 2003.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

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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On the modularization and reuse of exception handling with aspects

et al. 2009

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This paper presents an in‐depth study of the adequacy of the AspectJ language for modularizing and reusing exception‐handling code. The study consisted of refactoring existing applications so that the code responsible for implementing error‐handling strategies was moved to newly created exception handler aspects. We have performed quantitative assessments of five systems—four object‐oriented and one aspect‐oriented—based on four key quality attributes, namely separation of concerns, coupling, cohesion, and conciseness. Our investigation also included a multi‐perspective analysis of the refactored systems, including (i) the extent to which error‐handling aspects can be reused, (ii) the beneficial and harmful aspectization scenarios for exception handling, and (iii) the scalability of AOP to support the modularization of exception handling in the presence of other aspects. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

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Assessing the Impact of Aspects on Exception Flows: An Exploratory Study

Cited by 61 publications

References 25 publications

Students’ Strategies for Exception Handling

Students’ Strategies for Exception Handling

Global-Aware Recommendations for Repairing Exception Handling Violations

On the modularization and reuse of exception handling with aspects

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