A review on exception analysis

Context: Exception handling has become popular in most major programming languages, including Ada, C++, Java, and ML. Since exception handling was introduced in programming languages, there have been various kinds of exception analyses, which analyze exceptional behavior of programs statically or dynamically. Exception analyses have also been applied to various software engineering tasks such as testing, slicing, verification and visualization.Objective: This paper aims at providing a comprehensive view of studies on exception analysis. We conducted a review on exception analysis to identify and classify the studies.Method: We referred to the literature review method, and selected a comprehensive set of 87 papers on exception analysis from 515 papers published in journals and conference proceedings. The categorization and classification were done according to the research questions regarding to when they analyze, what they analyze, how to analyze, and applications of exception analysis.Results: We first identify three categories of static exception analysis and two categories of dynamic exception analysis together with the main applications of the exception analyses. We also discuss the main concepts, research methods used and major contributions of the studies on exception analysis.Conclusion: We have provided the comprehensive review of exception analysis. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first comprehensive review on exception analysis. As a further work, it would be interesting to see how the existing exception analysis techniques reviewed in this paper can be applied to other programming languages with exception handling mechanism, such as C#, Scala, and Eiffel, which have been rarely explored.

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