Analyzing Exception Flows of Aspect-Oriented Programs *

The goal of exception handling mechanisms is to make programs more reliable and robust. However, the integration of exception handling mechanisms with aspect-oriented languages raises unique issues. This paper presents a PhD work whose goal was to investigate such issues. The main contributions of this work were the following: (i) to perform the first exploratory study aiming at assessing the error proneness of AOP mechanisms on exception flows of programs; (ii) the development of SAFE (Static Analysis for the Flow of Exceptions), an exception-flow analysis tool for AspectJ programs; (iii) the identification of a set of bug patterns on the exception handling code of AO systems; and (iii) the definition of an approach that enables the developer to find faults on the exception handling code statically.

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