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Empirical Software Engineering
Erschienen in: Empirical Software Engineering 3/2017

13.08.2016

Exception handling bug hazards in Android

Results from a mining study and an exploratory survey

Erschienen in: Empirical Software Engineering | Ausgabe 3/2017

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Abstract

Adequate handling of exceptions has proven difficult for many software engineers. Mobile app developers in particular, have to cope with compatibility, middleware, memory constraints, and battery restrictions. The goal of this paper is to obtain a thorough understanding of common exception handling bug hazards that app developers face. To that end, we first provide a detailed empirical study of over 6,000 Java exception stack traces we extracted from over 600 open source Android projects. Key insights from this study include common causes for system crashes, and common chains of wrappings between checked and unchecked exceptions. Furthermore, we provide a survey with 71 developers involved in at least one of the projects analyzed. The results corroborate the stack trace findings, and indicate that developers are unaware of frequently occurring undocumented exception handling behavior. Overall, the findings of our study call for tool support to help developers understand their own and third party exception handling and wrapping logic.
Vorheriger Artikel Predicting the delay of issues with due dates in software projects
Nächster Artikel Do bugs foreshadow vulnerabilities? An in-depth study of the chromium project

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Fußnoten
1
K9Mail moved to GitHub but as a way of not loosing the project history it advises their users to report bugs in the Google Code issue tracker: https://​github.​com/​k9mail/​k-9/​wiki/​LoggingErrors.​
 
2
2 Google Code used to provide a Web service to its repositories, but this was deactivated in June 2013 in what Google called a “clean-up action”.
 
3
3 In several exception stack traces, the exception frames were preceded by logging information e.g., 03-01 15:55:01.609 (7924): at android.app.ActivityThread.access$600(Activity Thread.java:127) which could not be detected by existing tools.
 
6
6 The filtering was performed in two steps: firstly, we analyzed the bytecode of the JVM and identified all runtime exceptions defined by it (e.g., java.lang.NullPointerExceptoin,java.lang.ArrayIndexOutOfBounds), then if the libraries/framework method was signaling one of such exceptions it was filtered out from the analysis.
 
9
9 A toast is an Android component that provides simple feedback about an operation in a small popup – http://​developer.​android.​com/​guide/​topics/​ui/​notifiers/​toasts.​html.
 
10
This cross-type wrapping was found in several applications during the mining study as well as in some classes of the Android framework.
 
12
Brian Foote shared his opinion in a conversation with James Noble – quoted in the paper: hillside.​net/​plop/​2008/​papers/​ACMVersions/​coelho.​pdf.
 
13
Already supported by tools such as Eclipse, IntelliJ, Android Studio 0.5.5 (release Apr. 2014) to detect potential null pointer dereferences at compile time.
 
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Metadaten
Titel
Exception handling bug hazards in Android
Results from a mining study and an exploratory survey
Publikationsdatum
13.08.2016
Erschienen in
Empirical Software Engineering / Ausgabe 3/2017
Print ISSN: 1382-3256
Elektronische ISSN: 1573-7616
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1007/s10664-016-9443-7

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