Representing Exceptional Behaviour at the earlier Phases of Software Development
Rogério de Lemos · Kent Academic Repository (University of Kent) · 2001
Exception handling is a structuring technique that facilitates the design of systems by encapsulating the process of error recovery. Exception handling has been traditionally associated with the design phase of the software lifecycle, during which all the effort is made to protect the application software from faults that may be introduced during requirements, design, and implementation, or can occur at the support level. The consequence of such approach is that the appropriate context in which errors should be detected and recovered is lost also it is lost the potential correlation that might exist between the error states of the different contexts and how these should be recovered in an optimised way. Dealing with concurrent manifestations of several faults at different phases of system development has been recognised as a serious problem that has not received enough attention /Avizienes 97/. Ideally, for each identified phase of the software lifecycle, a class of exceptions should be defined depending on the abstraction level (or context) of the software system being modelled and analysed, as represented in figure 1. As the software development progresses, new exceptions are identified and