Unveiling Exception Handling Bug Hazards in Android Based on GitHub and Google Code Issues

Title

Unveiling Exception Handling Bug Hazards in Android Based on GitHub and Google Code Issues

 Author

Coelho, R.
Almeida, L.
Gousios, G.
Van Deursen, A.

Faculty

Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science

 Department

Software Technology

 Date

2015-12-31

 Abstract

This paper reports on a study mining the exception stack traces included in 159,048 issues reported on Android projects hosted in GitHub (482 projects) and Google Code (157 projects). The goal of this study is to investigate whether stack trace information can reveal bug hazards related to exception handling code that may lead to a decrease in application robustness. Overall 6,005 exception stack traces were extracted, and subjected to source code and bytecode analysis. The outcomes of this study include the identification of the following bug hazards: (i) unexpected cross-type exception wrappings (for instance, trying to handle an instance of OutOfMemoryError “hidden” in a checked exception) which can make the exceptionrelated code more complex and negatively impact the application robustness; (ii) ndocumented runtime exceptions thrown by both the Android platform and third party libraries; and (iii) undocumented checked exceptions thrown by the Android Platform. Such undocumented exceptions make difficult, and most of the times infeasible for the client code to protect against “unforeseen” situations that may happen while calling third-party code. This study provides further insights on such bug hazards and the robustness threats they impose to Android apps as well as to other systems based on the Java exception model.

 To reference this document use:

http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:6bc5d560-6563-4203-ad3d-80b86b51e591

 Publisher

Delft University of Technology, Software Engineering Research Group

 ISSN

1872-5392

 Source

http://swerl.tudelft.nl/bin/view/Main/TechnicalReports

 Source

Report TUD-SERG-2015-008

 Part of collection

Institutional Repository

 Document type

report

 Rights

© 2015 The Author(s) . Software Engineering Research Group, Department of Software Technology, Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science, Delft University of Technology
Files
PDF TUD-SERG-2015-008.pdf 633.39 KB
Close viewer