A Reflection on “An Exploratory Study on Exception Handling Bugs in Java Programs”

Exception handling is a feature provided by most mainstream programming languages, and typically involves constructs to throw and handle error signals. On the one hand, early work has argued extensively about the benefits of exception handling, such as promoting modularity by defining how exception handlers can be implemented and maintained independently of the normal behavior of the system and easing but localization. On the other hand, some studies argue that exception handling can make the programming languages unnecessarily complex and promote the introduction of subtle bugs in programs. In 2015 we published a paper describing a study investigating the prevalence and nature of exception handling bugs in two large, widely adopted Java systems. This study also confronted its findings about real exception handling bugs with the perceptions of developers about those bugs, also accounting for bugs not related to exception handling. The goal of this reflection paper is to investigate the state of the art in exception handling research, with a particular emphasis on exception handling bugs, and how our paper has influenced other studies in the area. We found that our paper was cited by 33 articles, and all themes for future work we raised in our paper have been tackled by other studies in the short span of five years.