Integrated analysis of exception flows and handler actions in Java libraries

Abstract

This paper presents an empirical study of exception handling strategies in Java libraries. The study conducts an integrated analysis of exception flows and handler actions from Java libraries with the aim to understand the impact of adopted exception handling strategies from the perspective of libraries' users. We extended an existing static analysis tool to identify exception flows in software libraries and collected data from the eight most downloaded Java libraries in Maven repository. After that, manual analysis was performed to categorize the tailored handler actions for each exception handler. Our results show that a high number of uncaught runtime exceptions and subsumption handlers were applied in some libraries. We also investigated the community anti-patterns implemented by handler actions in exception flows. Our results reveal the need to have automated support to allow the integrated analysis of exception flows and their handler actions explicitly.