CrashAwareDev: Supporting software development based on crash report mining and analysis

Abstract

Exception handling mechanisms are a common feature of mainstream programming languages to deal with exceptional conditions. If on the one hand they allow the programmer to prepare the code to deal with exceptional conditions, on the other hand they can become a source of bugs that threatens the application robustness - studies have shown that uncaught exceptions are the main cause of application crashes. To keep track of crashes and enable an easier fault localization, several applications, nowadays, use crash reporting tools. In this work, we propose a tool named CrashAwareDev, integrated with the Eclipse IDE, which mines the information available in crash reporting tools to support programmers in their day-to-day activities. The proposed tool alerts developers about the classes related to recent crashes and warns about source code characteristics (bug patterns) that can be related to future crashes (similar to the ones that have happened). Doing so the tool aims at bringing the development environment closer to crash reporting tools, that are usually only used for bug fixing or for extracting robustness metrics. A case study was conducted and showed that the tool can support software development by displaying bug pattern alerts directly in the source code, signaling the classes involved in recent faults, and speeding up the crash's fault localization within the development environment itself.