Analyzing exception flow in Java programs

  • Authors:

  • Martin P. Robillard;Gail C. Murphy

  • Affiliations:

  • Univ. of British Columbia, Vancouver, B.C., Canada;Univ. of British Columbia, Vancouver, B.C., Canada

  • Venue:
  • ESEC/FSE-7 Proceedings of the 7th European software engineering conference held jointly with the 7th ACM SIGSOFT international symposium on Foundations of software engineering
  • Year:
  • 1999

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Abstract

Exception handling mechanisms provided by programming languages are intended to ease the difficulty of developing robust software systems. Using these mechanisms, a software developer can describe the exceptional conditions a module might raise, and the response of the module to exceptional conditions that may occur as it is executing. Creating a robust system from such a localized view requires a developer to reason about the flow of exceptions across modules. The use of unchecked exceptions, and in object-oriented languages, subsumption, makes it difficult for a software developer to perform this reasoning manually. In this paper, we describe a tool called Jex that analyzes the flow of exceptions in Java code to produce views of the exception structure. We demonstrate how Jex can help a developer identify program points where exceptions are caught accidentally, where there is an opportunity to add finer-grained recovery code, and where error-handling policies are not being followed.