ExMinerSOF: minerando informações excepcionais do Stackoverflow

Abstract

Uncaught exceptions are not an exceptional sce- nario in current Java applications. They are actually one of the main causes of applications crashes, which can originate from programming errors on the application itself (null pointer dereferences); faults in underlying hardware or re-used APIs. Such uncaught exceptions result in exception stack traces that are often used by developers as a source of information for debugging. Currently, this information is ofttimes used by developers on search engines or Question and Answer sites while the developer tries to: better understand the cause of the crash and solve it. This study mined the exception stack traces embedded on StackOverflow (SOF) questions and answers. The goal of this work was to two-fold: to identify characteristics of stack traces mined from SOF and to investigate how such information can be used to prevent uncaught exceptions during software development. Overall 121.253 exception stack traces were extracted and analyzed in combination with Q&A inspections. Hence, this study proposes ExMinerSOF tool, which alerts the developer about the exceptions that can be potentially signaled by an API method but are not part of the API documentation - and was discovered by applying a mining strategy in SOF repository. Doing so, the tool enable the developer to prevent faults based on failures reported by the crowd.