Exception Handling Defects: An Empirical Study

Sawadpong, Puntitra; Allen, Edward B.; Williams, Byron

doi:10.1109/hase.2012.24

Cited by 31 publications

(30 citation statements)

References 13 publications

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“…We chose to focus on bug reports where exception handling is the cause of the problem as opposed to where the problem manifests itself : e.g., an exception that is not thrown when it should have been thrown or a catch block that captures exceptions that it should not have captured are considered EH-bugs while division by zero resulting in an exception being thrown is not considered as an EH-bug. We stress that our definition of the EH-bug differs from the one used by Sawadpong and colleagues [45], which considered as an EH-bug any bug report mentioning the words "exception", "throw", and "threw" or their derivatives. Division by zero, for instance, would always be considered an EH-bug by this previous work but not by ours.…”

Section: What Is An Exception Handling Bug?mentioning

confidence: 99%

An exploratory study on exception handling bugs in Java programs

Ebert

Castor

Serebrenik

2015

Journal of Systems and Software

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Most mainstream programming languages provide constructs to throw and to handle exceptions. However, several studies argue that exception handling code is usually of poor quality and that it is commonly neglected by developers. Moreover, it is said to be the least understood, documented, and tested part of the implementation of a system. Nevertheless, there are very few studies that analyze the actual exception handling bugs that occur in real software systems or that attempt to understand developers' perceptions of these bugs. In this work we present an exploratory study on exception handling bugs that employs two complementary approaches: a survey of 154 developers and an analysis of 220 exception handling bugs from the repositories of Eclipse and Tomcat.Only 27% of the respondents claimed that policies and standards for the implementation of error handling are part of the culture of their organizations. Moreover, in 70% of the organizations there are no specific tests for the exception handling code. Also, 61% of the respondents stated that no to little importance is given to the documentation of exception handling in the design phase of the projects with which they are involved. In addition, about 40% of the respondents consider the quality of exception handling code to be either good or very good and only 14% of the respondents consider it to be bad or very bad. Furthermore, the repository analysis has shown (with statistical significance) that exception handling bugs are ignored by developers less often than other bugs. We have also observed that while overly general catch blocks are a well-known bad smell related to exceptions, bugs stemming from these catch blocks are rare, even though many overly general catch blocks occur in the code. Furthermore, while develEmail addresses: fe@cin.ufpe.br (Felipe Ebert), castor@cin.ufpe.br (Fernando Castor), a.serebrenik@tue.nl (Alexander Serebrenik)Preprint submitted to Journal of Systems and Software April 23, 2015 ACCEPTED MANUSCRIPT A C C E P T E D M A N U S C R I P T opers often mention empty catch blocks as causes of bugs they have fixed in the past, we found very few bug reports caused by them. On top of that, empty catch blocks are frequently used as part of bug fixes, including fixes for exception handling bugs. Based on our findings, we propose a classification of exception handling bugs and their causes. The proposed classification can be used to assist in the design and implementation of test suites, to guide code inspections, or as a basis for static analysis tools.

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Section: What Is An Exception Handling Bug?mentioning

confidence: 99%

An exploratory study on exception handling bugs in Java programs

Ebert

Castor

Serebrenik

2015

Journal of Systems and Software

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“…We also do not include exception handling as SCJ programs can be statically verified to prove that exceptions are not thrown [11,17]. Furthermore, reliance on exceptions to handle errors has been discouraged by an empirical study due to the potential for errors in exception handling [26]. Errors caused in the SCJVM by an incorrect input program are represented by abortion.…”

Section: Scjvm and Interpreter Modelmentioning

confidence: 99%

Algebraic Compilation of Safety-Critical Java Bytecode

Baxter

Cavalcanti

2017

Lecture Notes in Computer Science

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Abstract. Safety-Critical Java (SCJ) is a version of Java that facilitates the development of certifiable programs, and requires a specialised virtual machine (SCJVM). In spite of the nature of the applications for which SCJ is designed, none of the SCJVMs are verified. In this paper, we contribute a formal specification of a bytecode interpreter for SCJ and an algebraic compilation strategy from Java bytecode to C. For the target C code, we adopt the compilation approach for icecap, the only SCJVM that is open source and up-to-date with the SCJ standard. Our work enables either prototyping of a verified compiler, or full verification of icecap or any other SCJVM.

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“…Finally, the studies presented in this section have focused on quantifying exception handling faults (SAWADPONG et al, 2012, MARINESCU, 2011 or on assessing specific types of exception handling faults, such as those related to generic catch blocks (MARINESCU, 2013) and uncaught exceptions (COELHO et al, 2008, CACHO et al, 2014a, CACHO et al, 2014b. Rather than these two kinds of exception handling faults, there is still little empirical knowledge about what other kinds of exception handling faults occur.…”

Section: Recurring Problems In Exception Handlingmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…However, recent empirical studies have shown that 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,MAR-INESCU, 2013, SAWADPONG et al, 2012. Sawadpong et al (SAWADPONG et al, 2012) conducted an exploratory study in the context of six major releases of Eclipse to compute the fault density of the source code. The authors defined fault density as the number of known faults divided by the number of lines of uncommented source code.…”

Section: Recurring Problems In Exception Handlingmentioning

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%

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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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Exception Handling Defects: An Empirical Study

Cited by 31 publications

References 13 publications

An exploratory study on exception handling bugs in Java programs

An exploratory study on exception handling bugs in Java programs

Algebraic Compilation of Safety-Critical Java Bytecode

Global-Aware Recommendations for Repairing Exception Handling Violations

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