Automatic documentation inference for exceptions

ABSTRACT

Exception handling is a powerful and widely-used programming language abstraction for constructing robust software systems. Unfortunately, it introduces an inter-procedural flow of control that can be difficult to reason about. Failure to do so correctly can lead to security vulnerabilities, breaches of API encapsulation, and any number of safety policy violations.

We present a fully automated tool that statically infers and characterizes exception-causing conditions in Java programs. Our tool is based on an inter-procedural, context-sensitive analysis. The output of this tool is well-suited for use as human-readable documentation of exceptional conditions.

We evaluate the output of our tool by comparing it to over 900 instances of existing exception documentation in almost two million lines of code. We find that the output of our tool is at least as good as existing documentation 85% of the time and is better 25% of the time.

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INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  D. Software
  D.2 SOFTWARE ENGINEERING
      D.2.7 Distribution, Maintenance, and Enhancement
          Subjects: Documentation

Additional Classification:
  F. Theory of Computation
  F.3 LOGICS AND MEANINGS OF PROGRAMS
      F.3.1 Specifying and Verifying and Reasoning about Programs
          Subjects: Specification techniques

General Terms:
Documentation, Human Factors

Keywords:
documentation inference, exception handling, software documentation