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An Empirical Study on Inter-Component Exception Notification in Android Platform

Authors:

Vladymir L. Bezerra,

Lincoln S. Rocha,

João Bosco F. Filho,

Fernando A. M. TrintaAuthors Info & Claims

SBES '19: Proceedings of the XXXIII Brazilian Symposium on Software Engineering

Pages 73 - 83

https://doi.org/10.1145/3350768.3350784

Published: 23 September 2019 Publication History

Abstract

Android developers extensively use exception handling to improve robustness of mobile applications. The Android architecture and the object-oriented paradigm impose complexity to the way applications handle exceptions; many different components communicate among themselves and exceptions may be raised in parts that are not responsible for handling the error. A straightforward solution is to send the exception notification to its concerning handler. However, we do not know to which extent developers are sending exception notifications between Android components. Studying and analyzing the state of the practice of exception notification in Android will allow us to identify patterns and flaws in real-world applications; drawing this panorama can help developers to construct more reliable, modular and maintainable solutions. For this purpose, we conduct an empirical study that takes 66,099 Android projects and answers: (i) if the project uses exception notification; and (ii) how notification is performed (how signaling and handling code is implemented). We found that 1,327 applications use exception notification, following different practices: 2 for sending notifications and 2 for handling the exceptions. Our study paves the way for constructing better mechanisms for communicating exception notifications in Java-based Android applications.

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Cited By

Freitas FRocha LHenrique M. Maia P(2023)A Pub/Sub-Based Mechanism for Inter-Component Exception Notification in Android Applications2023 IEEE 20th International Conference on Software Architecture (ICSA)10.1109/ICSA56044.2023.00018(105-116)Online publication date: Mar-2023
https://doi.org/10.1109/ICSA56044.2023.00018

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Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

cover image ACM Other conferences

SBES '19: Proceedings of the XXXIII Brazilian Symposium on Software Engineering

September 2019

583 pages

ISBN:9781450376518

DOI:10.1145/3350768

General Chairs:
Ivan Machado
UFBA
,
Rodrigo Souza
UFBA
,
Rita Suzana Maciel
UFBA
,
Claudio Sant'Anna
UFBA

Copyright © 2019 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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SBC: Sociedade Brasileira de Computação

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

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Published: 23 September 2019

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SBES 2019

SBES 2019: XXXIII Brazilian Symposium on Software Engineering

September 23 - 27, 2019

Salvador, Brazil

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SBES '19 Paper Acceptance Rate 67 of 153 submissions, 44%;

Overall Acceptance Rate 147 of 427 submissions, 34%

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Cited By

Freitas FRocha LHenrique M. Maia P(2023)A Pub/Sub-Based Mechanism for Inter-Component Exception Notification in Android Applications2023 IEEE 20th International Conference on Software Architecture (ICSA)10.1109/ICSA56044.2023.00018(105-116)Online publication date: Mar-2023
https://doi.org/10.1109/ICSA56044.2023.00018

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