ExceptionPolicyExpert: uma ferramenta para auxiliar no desenvolvimento do tratamento de exceções

Abstract

As our society becomes more and more dependent of software systems the demand robustness requirements increases. The exception handling mechanism is one of the most used techniques to enable the development of robust software systems develop. The exception handling policy comprises the set of rules that specify how exceptions should be thrown and handled inside a system. But usually the policy is not explicitly defined. As a consequence, it becomes a challenge for developers to create the exception handling code according to it. This work proposes an Eclipse plug-in, called ExceptionPolicyExpert, to guide the developer on how to implement this kind of code by checking policy violations and providing recommendations to developers concerning how to exceptions should be handled and signaled. In order to support the creation of such tool, we performed an exploratory study, using Grounded Theory techniques, to understand which are the main challenges that the developers have during the implementation of the exception handling code. This study showed that most of the developers did not receive any instructions regarding the exception handling policy and they often handle exceptions in a wrong way. Therefore, the proposed tool aims to provide information to developer regarding the exception handling policy integrated to the IDE - helping him/her to develop exception handling code and preventing policy violations. The tool evaluation showed that the tool helps the developer to make decisions when implementing the exception handling code.