Analyzing exception flow in Java (tm) programs

Exception handling mechanisms provided by programming languages are intended to ease the difficulty of developing robust software systems. Using these mechanisms, a software developer can describe the exceptional conditions a module might raise, and the response of the module to exceptional conditions that may occur as it is executing. Creating a robust system from such a localized view requires a developer to reason about the flow of exceptions across modules. The use of unchecked exceptions, and in object-oriented languages, subsumption, makes it difficult for a software developer to perform this reasoning manually. In this thesis, I describe an approach for analyzing the flow of exceptions in Java source code to produce views of the exception structure. The approach is supported by a tool called Jex. I demonstrate how Jex can help a developer identify program points where exceptions are caught accidentally, where there is an opportunity to add finer-grain recovery code, and where error handling policies are not being followed.Science, Faculty ofComputer Science, Department ofGraduat