How developers use exception handling in Java?

Abstract

Exception handling is a technique that addresses exceptional conditions in applications, allowing the normal flow of execution to continue in the event of an exception and/or to report on such events. Although exception handling techniques, features and bad coding practices have been discussed both in developer communities and in the literature, there is a marked lack of empirical evidence on how developers use exception handling in practice. In this paper we use the Boa language and infrastructure to analyze 274k open source Java projects in GitHub to discover how developers use exception handling. We not only consider various exception handling features but also explore bad coding practices and their relation to the experience of developers. Our results provide some interesting insights. For example, we found that bad exception handling coding practices are common in open source Java projects and regardless of experience all developers use bad exception handling coding practices.