Exception-Chain Analysis: Revealing Exception Handling Architecture in Java Server Applications

Widespread usage of independently developed COTS components or frameworks facilitates construction of large software systems, but complicates the task of ensuring their availability, because error recovery code often spans components. Existing exception-flow analyses of varying precision, find only single links in any exception propagation path. Therefore, although it is common in large Java programs to rethrow exceptions, these analyses are unable to identify these multiple-link exception propagation paths. This paper presents a new static analysis that computes chains of semantically-related exception-flow links, and thus reports an entire exception propagation path, instead of just discrete segments of it.