Global-Aware Recommendations for Repairing Violations in Exception Handling

Empirical evidence suggests exception handling is not reliably implemented. Most faults in exception handling are related to global exceptions violating the intended exception handling design. However, repairing these violations is a cumbersome and error-prone task. It requires knowing the intended design and understanding how the source code violates it. It also requires changing the source code to make it compliant with the intended design. But changing the exception handling code is a difficult task, since changes in exception handling requires changing different parts of a program. Currently, there is still no solution to assist the repair of this type of violations. To bridge this gap, we present RAVEN, a heuristic strategy aware of the global context of exceptions that produces recommendations of how violations in exception handling may be repaired. This strategy takes advantage of explicit specifications of the intended design, although their availability is not mandatory. Our results revealed RAVEN provides recommendations able to repair violations in 69 percent of the cases when policy specifications are not available and in 97 percent of the cases when specifications are available. Thus, development teams may benefit from RAVEN, even when exception handling design decisions are not documented in their projects.