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Exception handling bug hazards in Android

Results from a mining study and an exploratory survey

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Abstract

Adequate handling of exceptions has proven difficult for many software engineers. Mobile app developers in particular, have to cope with compatibility, middleware, memory constraints, and battery restrictions. The goal of this paper is to obtain a thorough understanding of common exception handling bug hazards that app developers face. To that end, we first provide a detailed empirical study of over 6,000 Java exception stack traces we extracted from over 600 open source Android projects. Key insights from this study include common causes for system crashes, and common chains of wrappings between checked and unchecked exceptions. Furthermore, we provide a survey with 71 developers involved in at least one of the projects analyzed. The results corroborate the stack trace findings, and indicate that developers are unaware of frequently occurring undocumented exception handling behavior. Overall, the findings of our study call for tool support to help developers understand their own and third party exception handling and wrapping logic.

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Notes

  1. K9Mail moved to GitHub but as a way of not loosing the project history it advises their users to report bugs in the Google Code issue tracker: https://github.com/k9mail/k-9/wiki/LoggingErrors.

  2. 2 Google Code used to provide a Web service to its repositories, but this was deactivated in June 2013 in what Google called a “clean-up action”.

  3. 3 In several exception stack traces, the exception frames were preceded by logging information e.g., 03-01 15:55:01.609 (7924): at android.app.ActivityThread.access$600(Activity Thread.java:127) which could not be detected by existing tools.

  4. 4 https://www.bugsense.com/.

  5. 5 http://docs.oracle.com/javase/specs/jls/se7/html/jls-13.html.

  6. 6 The filtering was performed in two steps: firstly, we analyzed the bytecode of the JVM and identified all runtime exceptions defined by it (e.g., java.lang.NullPointerExceptoin,java.lang.ArrayIndexOutOfBounds), then if the libraries/framework method was signaling one of such exceptions it was filtered out from the analysis.

  7. 7 http://www.slideshare.net/pyricau/crash-fast.

  8. 8 http://developer.android.com/reference/java/lang/Thread.UncaughtExceptionHandler.html.

  9. 9 A toast is an Android component that provides simple feedback about an operation in a small popup – http://developer.android.com/guide/topics/ui/notifiers/toasts.html.

  10. This cross-type wrapping was found in several applications during the mining study as well as in some classes of the Android framework.

  11. code.google.com/p/acra/.

  12. Brian Foote shared his opinion in a conversation with James Noble – quoted in the paper: hillside.net/plop/2008/papers/ACMVersions/coelho.pdf.

  13. Already supported by tools such as Eclipse, IntelliJ, Android Studio 0.5.5 (release Apr. 2014) to detect potential null pointer dereferences at compile time.

  14. code.google.com/p/acra/.

  15. https://www.google.com/analytics/.

  16. https://bugsnag.com/.

  17. https://github.com/souzacoelho/exceptionminer.

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Acknowledgments

This work is partially supported by the National Institute of Science and Technology for Software Engineering (INES), CNPq and FACEPE, grants 573964/2008-4, 552645/2011-7, and APQ-1037-1.03/08, CNPq Universal grant 484209/2013-2, and CAPES/PROAP.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Federal University of Rio Grande do Norte, CIVT/UFRN. Av. Senador Salgado Filho, 3000. Lagoa Nova, CEP: 59.078-970., Natal/RN, Brazil

    Roberta Coelho & Lucas Almeida

  2. Federal Institute of Education, Science and Technology of Rio Grande do Norte, Campus São Gonçalo do Amarante., Rua Alexandre Cavalcanti Centro. 59290000 -, São Gonçalo do Amarante, RN, Brazil

    Lucas Almeida

  3. Delft University of Technology, Mekelweg 4, 2628CD, Delft, The Netherlands

    Georgios Gousios & Arie van Deursen

  4. University of Adelaide, School of Computer Science, Ingkarni Wardli 4.48, Adelaide, SA, 5005, Australia

    Christoph Treude

Authors
  1. Roberta Coelho
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  2. Lucas Almeida
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  3. Georgios Gousios
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  4. Arie van Deursen
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  5. Christoph Treude
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Correspondence to Roberta Coelho.

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Communicated by: Romain Robbes, Martin Pinzger and Yasutaka Kamei

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Coelho, R., Almeida, L., Gousios, G. et al. Exception handling bug hazards in Android. Empir Software Eng 22, 1264–1304 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10664-016-9443-7

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