Title
Preventing Erosion in Exception Handling Design Using Static-Architecture Conformance Checking.
Abstract
Exception handling is a common error recovery technique employed to improve software robustness. However, studies have reported that exception handling is commonly neglected by developers and is the least understood and documented part of a software project. The lack of documentation and difficulty in understanding the exception handling design can lead developers to violate important design decisions, triggering an erosion process in the exception handling design. Architectural conformance checking provides means to control the architectural erosion by periodically checking if the actual architecture is consistent with the planned one. Nevertheless, available approaches do not provide a proper support for exception handling conformance checking. To fulfill this gap, we propose ArCatch: an architectural conformance checking solution to deal with the exception handling design erosion. ArCatch provides: (i) a declarative language for expressing design constraints regarding exception handling; and (ii) a design rule checker to automatically verify the exception handling conformance. To evaluate the usefulness and effectiveness of our approach, we conducted a case study, in which we evaluated an evolution scenario composed by 10 versions of an existing web-based Java system. Each version was checked against the same set of exception handling design rules. Based on the results and the feedback given by the system's architect, the ArCatch proved useful and effective in the identification of existing exception handling erosion problems and locating its causes in the source code.
Year
DOI
Venue
2017
10.1007/978-3-319-65831-5_5
Lecture Notes in Computer Science
Keywords
Field
DocType
Exception handling design,Exception handling erosion,Architecture conformance checking
Software engineering,Systems engineering,Source code,Computer science,Exception handling,Robustness (computer science),Software,Declarative programming,Conformance checking,Documentation,Java,Reliability engineering
Conference
Volume
ISSN
Citations 
10475
0302-9743
5
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.41
19
4
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Juarez L. M. Filho150.41
Lincoln Rocha29311.22
Rossana M. C. Andrade335458.76
Ricardo Britto411715.18