An Empirical Study of Exception Handling Bugs and Fixes
Tam The Nguyen, Phong Minh Vu, Tung Thanh Nguyen · 2019
Modern programming languages often provide a mechanism for programmers to handle exceptions, i.e., unexpected errors occurring while a software system is running. Failing to catch and handle exceptions properly often leads to serious issues such as crashing, resource leaking, or causing negative end-user experiences. However, learning exception handling patterns is often challenging due to the insufficiency of API documentation and source code examples. To understand the nature of exception-related bugs and how developers fix them, in this paper, we performed an empirical study on nearly 300 exception-related bugs and fixes from 10 mobile apps. We report five findings which provide insights about those exception bugs and fixes.