Analyzing Exception Flow in Java Programs

ID
TR-99-02
Authors
Martin R. Robillard and Gail C. Murphy
Publishing date
March 02, 1999
Length
15 pages
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.