Visualization of exception handling constructs to support program understanding

This paper presents a new visualization technique for supporting the understanding of exception-handling constructs in Java programs. To understand the requirements for such a visualization, we sur-veyed a group of software developers, and used the results of that survey to guide the creation of the visualizations. The technique presents the exception-handling information using three views: the quantitative view, the flow view, and the contextual view. The quan-titative view provides a high-level view that shows the throw-catch interactions in the program, along with relative numbers of these interactions, at the package level, the class level, and the method level. The flow view shows the type-throw-catch interactions, illus-trating information such as which exception types reach particular throw statements, which catch statements handle particular throw statements, and which throw statements are not caught in the pro-gram. The contextual view shows, for particular type-throw-catch interactions, the packages, classes, and methods that contribute to that exception-handling construct. The paper also presents a case study in which we evaluated a prototype of the visualization system on a small set of developers