Don't Forget the Exception! Considering Robustness Changes to Identify Design Problems
Modern programming languages, such as Java, use exception-handling mechanisms to guarantee the robustness of software systems. Although important, the quality of exception code is usually poor and neglected by developers. Indiscriminate robustness changes (e.g., the addition of empty catch blocks) can indicate design decisions that negatively impact the internal quality of software systems. As it is known in the literature, multiple occurrences of poor code structures, namely code smells, are strong indicators of design problems. Still, existing studies focus mainly on the correlation of maintainability smells with design problems. However, using only these smells may not be enough since developers need more context (e.g., system domain) to identify the problems in certain scenarios. Moreover, these studies do not explore how changes in the exceptional code of the methods combined with maintainability smells can give complementary evidence of design problems. By covering both regular and exception codes, the developer can have more context about the system and find complementary code smells that reinforce the presence of design problems. This work aims to leverage the identification of design problems by tracking poor robustness changes combined with maintainability smells. We investigated the correlation between robustness changes and maintainability smells on the commit history of more than 160k methods from different releases of 10 open-source software systems. We observed that maintainability smells can be worsened or even introduced when robustness changes are performed. This scenario mainly happened for the Feature Envy, Long Method, and Dispersed Coupling smells. We also analyzed the co-occurrence between robustness and maintainability smells. We identified that the empty catch block and catch throwable robustness smells were the ones that co-occurred the most with maintainability smells related to the Concern Overload and Misplaced Concern design problems. The contribution of our work is to reveal that poor exception code, usually neglected by developers, negatively impacts the overall quality of software systems. Therefore, existing code smell detecting tools can be enhanced to leverage robustness changes to identify design problems.
Tue 16 MayDisplayed time zone: Hobart change
11:00 - 11:45 | Code SmellsTechnical Papers / Industry Track / Data and Tool Showcase Track at Meeting Room 110 Chair(s): Md Tajmilur Rahman Gannon University | ||
11:00 12mTalk | Don't Forget the Exception! Considering Robustness Changes to Identify Design Problems Technical Papers Anderson Oliveira PUC-Rio, João Lucas Correia Federal University of Alagoas, Leonardo Da Silva Sousa Carnegie Mellon University, USA, Wesley Assunção Johannes Kepler University Linz, Austria & Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, Daniel Coutinho PUC-Rio, Alessandro Garcia PUC-Rio, Willian Oizumi GoTo, Caio Barbosa UFAL, Anderson Uchôa Federal University of Ceará, Juliana Alves Pereira PUC-Rio Pre-print | ||
11:12 12mTalk | Pre-trained Model Based Feature Envy Detection Technical Papers mawenhao Wuhan University, Yaoxiang Yu Wuhan University, Xiaoming Ruan Wuhan University, Bo Cai Wuhan University | ||
11:24 6mTalk | CLEAN++: Code Smells Extraction for C++ Data and Tool Showcase Track Tom Mashiach Ben Gurion University of the Negev, Israel, Bruno Sotto-Mayor Ben Gurion University of the Negev, Israel, Gal Kaminka Bar Ilan University, Israel, Meir Kalech Ben Gurion University of the Negev, Israel | ||
11:30 6mTalk | DACOS-A Manually Annotated Dataset of Code Smells Data and Tool Showcase Track Himesh Nandani Dalhousie University, Mootez Saad Dalhousie University, Tushar Sharma Dalhousie University Pre-print File Attached | ||
11:36 6mTalk | What Warnings Do Engineers Really Fix? The Compiler That Cried Wolf Industry Track Gunnar Kudrjavets University of Groningen, Aditya Kumar Snap, Inc., Ayushi Rastogi University of Groningen, The Netherlands Pre-print | ||